The Stage is Set

The Front Page of Davis Wiki on April First.

We made the wiki look like it did when it was first started years ago on PhilipNeustrom's laptop. See Wiki History for a screenshot to compare against! Everything looked primitive and...awful.

Not only were edit controls hard to find, but the lack of a search bar drove some to frustration.

The Curtain Rises on Our Stage

On March 14th, JabberWokky approached JasonAller about a few April Fool's Day ideas. The second was to reveal to the world that they were, in fact, the same person. Very quickly PhilipNeustrom was involved and the plan became a day long slowly escalating event wherein admins would be banned, user entries would be vandalized, and various editors would have utter melt-downs.

Key to this is that for much of the time that JabberWokky has been editing the wiki he has not been present physically in California, even though he is still here in spirit. As such few people have physically met JabberWokky which left open the possibility that he was a sock puppet for the oft bearded and unphotographed Jason. The recent emergence of the Philip Neustrom Theory page gave the opportunity to make fun of taking edit counts as a strict measure of worth, and a gave a place to start the whole thing off.

This was born... The Banninating. Or Braninating, if you're Graham Freeman.

Act One

wherein the rumblings of strife foreshadow the coming storm

The day started off with a beautiful morning. Flowers were in the air, the smell of birds on the wind... and a flame war was going on about stats. It started when JabberWokky uploaded a graph and asserted that he would get to 10,000 edits before Jason or Philip. The argument quickly devolved into arguments over what constituted "legitimate edits", and ended with a fecal photo (warning: icky photo) resulting in Jason being banned, his user entry in an odd state.

With the stage set, the players stepped into the shadows for the second phase. It should be noted that JessicaLuedtke and BrentLaabs contacted Jason and JabberWokky at this point to acknowledge the prank. Nobody stepped forward to defend Jason (which we had thought would occur), so the early afternoon progressed without further controversy.

Act Two

wherein subtlety is the name of the game

In the early evening, JabberWokky started posting very Jason-esque entries, including memorial plaques and memorial benches. Then "JabberWokky" resumed more typical edits, linking and formatting... but from a Davis IP. We figured somebody would notice for sure, but as time went on, we had to call upon BrentLaabs to step up on stage. At this point, Jason, Philip and Jabber were in #dw41 on IRC.

    You there, you want to be Victim #2? Get on stage! Okay, wear this hat, take this script and walk through that door when I say "What link through yonder entry breaks?"

Brent proceeded to change "football" to "soccer" several times on the illustrious Toilet Papering page, which eventually translated into a flame war between the two. Both accused the other of not being in Davis, and this fight finally escalated to the page "Petition to Ban Brent Laabs" (a reference to Ban Steven Ostrowski). This page was renamed to "Petition to Get Stick out of Jabber Wokky's Ass", and with a dash of nazi furries, Brent was banned for being a sockpuppet of Jason Aller.

Act Three

wherein every editor jumps on the pile and Philip raises the hammer

...fill 'er out...

Philip may have made the best single edit comment in DavisWiki history with: "banned JabberWokky.he's same person as JasonAller, who was banned by JabberWokky". He then explained in BannedGroup/Talk:

    Okay, I sort of let this go for a long while, as I've had private conversations with "both" JasonAller and JabberWokky. When I first confronted JasonAller about the issue — that it appears JasonAller and JabberWokky are indeed the same person — he remarked that it was simply a mistake. Over the course of a couple weeks of discussion with him he came to admit that he believes he has a case of a spilt personally.

    Now, I hadn't seen it get in the way until now, so I sort of let it go. But it's gone way, way too far. Seeing as JasonAller has been banned, it only makes sense to ban his sockpuppet, JabberWokky. They are, in fact, the same person. It's really easy to see by looking at their IP addresses, etc.

    JessicaLuedtke added: I've long been convinced JabberWokky doesn't really exist, as I've never met him in real life. I have, however, met JasonAller. I believe you are correct.

Act Four

wherein the king yells "Gangbang!"

A flurry of edits followed, including:

Our apologies to anyone who didn't look

at the calendar and see that it was April Fools Day!

What do you remember?

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2007-04-02 00:39:14   Admin wars and inside jokes. Hilarious. —AndrewChen

  • Hilarious like a car crash, or like a three legged dog? —TravisGrathwell

2007-04-02 00:56:14   I'll admit, you had me (and probably at least half of the other Wikizens observing what was going on) fooled. That Front Page was a 180-degree turn from the "true" format in terms of user friendliness and organization. A joke well-executed, I must say, but it's nice to have the old format back, as well as clarification that JabberWokky and JasonAller are, in fact, different people. —LeonardMarque

2007-04-02 01:49:02   HHRRRRRRRRRRAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH SNORRRRRK BWAAAAAAAAAA HAHAHAHAHAAHA!!

Sweetness. —KarlMogel

2007-04-02 06:29:05   I almost reverted JW's page to the fecal photo yesterday afternoon. That was a classic! —DavidGrundler

2007-04-02 07:21:49   This page has no relevance to Davis. Vote for deletion. —JeffSpeckles

2007-04-02 14:38:42   Man, I missed all the fun. I just saw the deleted pages "Proposal to Ban BrentLaabs", et. al. What a crackup. —JanelleAlvstadMattson

2007-04-02 14:51:12   Still checking the April Fools edits, and still laughing. Way better than the idea I cooked up, which didn't have time to implement, and wouldn't have been as funny here as on wikispot. —KarlMogel

2007-04-02 16:01:13   In the morning, I thought someone had hacked the wiki as an April Fools joke. I visited again later when the banning was beginning and thought it was YOUR April Fools prank. Then I visited later and had doubts again — I thought that maybe you guys were having problems executing it and that the annoyances were serious. Then I changed my mind again and realized... no, no, it definitely has to be a prank. (Yes, I can be naive sometimes.) It was fun to watch, especially nearing midnight. My favorite part was when Jessica marked UC Davis as irrelevant and Joseph deleted it. —NumiaCairaguas

2007-04-02 18:18:35   I took a look at the layout and instantly realized it was April fools day, but good work —StevenDaubert

2007-04-05 16:39:18   haha you guys had me fooled for a small bit. But even after i realized it was a prank i still wanted my search bar back. —MattHh

2007-04-12 02:38:04   Philip, I thought we had this figured out last year — what happened to our magnificent secret plan? —ChristopherMckenzie

  • Philip was busy working on Really Big Things. It's a testament to his sense of humor that he lent a hand to this year's events at all. —jw
  • I think we need a secret page on the wiki where we have a list of a bunch of ideas so they're never forgotten :) —PhilipNeustrom
    • Under the new system we can do that with security settings. Yay ~DavePoole

2007-04-12 19:19:19   Was the fact that the random page was always Xanga a statment of some variety? —CraigFergus

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