Elephant (wikipedia article) was a Wikipedia article about the Wikipedia article about elephants. It was created on August 19, 2006, by User:John Kenney.[1] Because "Wikipedia" in the article name refers to Wikipedia it is a proper noun which should have been capitalized according to Wikipedia's Manual of Style,[2] so this article should have been named "Elephant (Wikipedia article)".
In its original form, Elephant (wikipedia article) simple documented a joke by Stephen Colbert on his television show, The Colbert Report, in which "he advised viewers to edit the article [Elephant] to indicate that the population of elephants had tripled in the last six months."[1] Over the article's first week, additional information was added, observing that "Elephant" was "among the oldest" Wikipedia articles, with its origins "lost due to software updates".[3]
Approximately two months after creation, Elephant (wikipedia article) was nominated for deletion. Around the same time, it was listed in Wikipedia's "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense", copied (including the deletion notice) to the Uncyclopedia. Shortly before being deleted from articlespace it was userfied, and it remains in Wikipedia userspace to this day.
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Wikipedia does capitalize initial letters of proper nouns, and often proper adjectives. In doing this, we follow common usage, and when uncapitalized forms are the normal English usage (abelian group, k.d. lang), we follow common usage.