Wikipedia:April Fools' Main Page/Featured Article/Archive 2012

Please use this page for discussions surrounding the creation of a Featured Article for April Fool's day 2012

Areas of work needed to complete the front page are:

Ground rules for this activity along with a list or participants may be found on the Main talk page.

Mission

In the past, various unusual articles have been improved to featured article status. These include exploding whale, heavy metal umlaut, Japanese toilet, spoo, Joshua A. Norton, George Washington (inventor), and Ima Hogg. People seeing some of these articles listed on the Main Page sometimes believe that it is a joke, when in fact, these articles are well-written and quite deserving of featured article status.

An unusual article (such as exploding toad or Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch) will be edited up to Featured article status and listed on the Main Page on 1 April 2012. The "recently featured" sentence could be changed to "other featured", and link to the above-mentioned unusual featured articles.

Given the amount of time it takes to bring an article up to Featured article status, an alternative solution would be to use an article that has already been made a Featured article, but has not yet been listed on the Main Page.

Requirements

Raul is willing to consider any article for April Fools' Day, as long as it meets three requirements:

R1. It must be a featured article by April 1 2012
R2. It must not have already been used as the main page featured article.
R3. It is not too risqué (more so than any other article that would be used on the front page)

Action items

What are we going to write/promote? We need to pick either a new topic or an existing article to nominate for FA. I think we need half a dozen nominees - then we vote/get consensus on which one is most suitable.
We have to work hard to get it up to featured status. This may be very difficult and might take several attempts.
We have to usher it through all of the phases leading up to FA.
We need to make sure it's on the front page on April 1st. This means starting in on it fairly soon.

Proposals

Just saw that these two articles were promoted:

Olivia Shakespear - Shakespear was an English novelist and poet who had an affair with William Butler Yeats and later married Ezra Pound
Pigeon photography - Finally made it to featured. Way too crazy to be true.

--Found5dollar (talk) 00:48, 10 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure where to propose it, but if it were improved in time (we have plenty of it)... Nazi talking dogs. It would need some major work in that time though. Crisco 1492 (talk) 16:04, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The sole source for Nazi talking dogs is Jan Bondeson, who has a well-deserved reputation for making sensationalist claims that don't stand up to scrutiny. Unless and until someone can find a primary source for any of his claims, it's definitely not something we should be hosting on the main page. – iridescent 16:20, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

True. Do we have any editors in Germany who could be troubled to look? Clearly documents like that will probably not be online. Crisco 1492 (talk) 23:40, 27 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]

My strong suspicion is that if such an extraordinary (and media-friendly) story had actually occurred, in probably the single most-researched period in world history, an actual historian would have spotted it by now. Bondeson is not a historian (he's a doctor based in Cardiff, who dabbles in conspiracy theorising and "believe it or not" miracles-of-nature popular books) and I regularly come across him misrepresenting sources to a ludicrous degree. (Before anyone accuses me of BLP violation, here's a concrete example of Bondeson openly fabricating a source to support one of his pet theories: compare the "poem from old charity documents" he quotes here as proof that the Biddenden Maids legend of Kent is an old legend and not a recent invention, with the actual source of the poem, an 1805 description of Melrose Abbey by Sir Walter Scott.) – iridescent 13:42, 28 May 2011 (UTC)[reply]