 | Edit warring is prohibited even on April Fool's Day; editors who edit war will be blocked. The two Great Edit Wars occurred before there was consensus to apply this rule to April Fools Day pages. This page is preserved solely as an archive of past conduct necessitating this rule; nothing on this page is meant to promote or encourage future edit wars. |
 | This page contains material that is kept because it is considered humorous. Such material is not meant to be taken seriously. |
Since 2004, it has been a Wikipedia tradition to play a few pranks every April 1st and then record them in a centralized location for future editors to enjoy. These jokes were first gathered together in BJAODN and then Wikipedia:April Fools, but were eventually given their own stand-alone page. The jokes on these pages tend to fall into three core categories: joke deletions, joke nominations, and miscellaneous. Over the years, the miscellaneous category has been given several names. However, in 2014 the miscellaneous section was labeled “General Tomfoolery”; this section title has been in use ever since.
In 2015, an editor changed the name of the section to “General Jerryfoolery” (in reference to Tom and Jerry, a popular cartoon series). The change was repeated in 2016, and resulted in a minor (but friendly) edit war that was repeated in 2017 and 2018.
The 2019 page was created in the late evening of March 31; a section for miscellaneous pranks was quickly created with the title “General Jerryfoolery”. Another editor tried changing it to the standard “General Tomfoolery” but was soon reverted. The ensuing struggle to control the section name resulted in the creation of over one-hundred different titles by the first hour of April 2nd. This article contains a chronology of the changes made to the section title and attempts to document a truly hilarious moment in our community’s history.
In 2020, it was repeated, but on a far larger scale and without the hilarity, affecting the entire page. Additional edit wars included copy pasting whole pages, increasing text sizes to massive proportions, altering width, skew, and rotation of the page, hosting a nature reserve, and much, much more, however, with the exception of the Foolery headline, the edit wars mostly stopped because the page was protected and certain guidelines were made for those that could still edit, resulting in the 2020 edit war ending in a more friendly edit war than its first 3 hours.