Wikitravel talk:Joke articles

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[edit] Protecting joke articles?

What I'm about to suggest is really un-Wiki, but...

While April Fool's articles get polished to a high sheen before and during the big day, they tend to attract edits afterwards that are marginally if at all funny and detract from the overall quality. I don't think this is fixable: writing collaborative humor is hard, and it's even harder to filter out "good" from "bad" edits. And, except for that one special day a year, it's not Wikitravel's goal to write humor.

So I'd suggest that, on April 2nd, the articles get permanently locked. That way they stay funny (or at least as funny as they ever were) and users' and admins' time is not wasted. Opinions? Jpatokal 09:39, 21 April 2007 (EDT)

Bump? Jpatokal 23:03, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

Un-wiki it may be, but the number of Hell edits is getting a bit ridiculous... -- Bill-on-the-Hill 23:30, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

Agree. Edits to joke articles like Arial are still ongoing, and serve no project purpose. -- Colin 00:03, 25 April 2007 (EDT)

Disagree, mostly on the principle that reverting damage is better than blocking. Arial's hardly a hotbed of edits (one batch of decent jokes added in a whole year), and even the edits to Hell have tapered off in the last week. Before taking the step of protecting them, I'd like to try putting a disclaimerbox at the top of these articles asking people not to edit them (and take the "plunge forward" invitation out of the status box at the bottom) to see if that helps. - Todd VerBeek 00:26, 25 April 2007 (EDT)

Agree with Todd... changing the plunge forward would probably help tremendously. And change "this IS an April Fool's joke" to "this WAS an April Fool's..." may help a little too. We could just put that box at the top of the article. How about:

This was an April Fool's Joke article, we amused ourselves tremendously in making it. Please refrain from dragging out the sillyness and plunge forward on some real articles! – cacahuate ^talk 02:24, 25 April 2007 (EDT)

I went ahead and changed the template as above, and moved the notes to the top of the pages... but if you've got a better idea on the wording for the template, go for it... – cacahuate ^talk 02:40, 25 April 2007 (EDT)

I think this probably makes sense. What if we move them out of the main namespace and into a new namespace, "Joke:", "Archive:" or "Historical:"? That would make it clear why we're protecting them. --Evan 11:16, 26 April 2007 (EDT)

So, I'm in support of protecting these articles. It's been over a month and hell is still getting edits, we should strongly discourage edits and the reformed template isn't doing that. I vote protect. -- Sapphire • (Talk) • 22:53, 8 May 2007 (EDT)

Werd, protect. Jordanmills 01:00, 9 May 2007 (EDT)

Asking nicely isn't working as well as I hoped. - Todd VerBeek 11:24, 16 May 2007 (EDT)

Well then, I went ahead and protected them since I'm completely out-voted... though I really don't think they were getting all that many edits anymore, and it isn't difficult to keep reverting them. But I guess it's not a huge deal, and now we don't have to think about it anymore  :) – cacahuate ^talk 18:48, 16 May 2007 (EDT)