 | 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. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Oh God, not another one! |
| The April Fools' Day Edit War of 2020 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oh God, not another one! Part of Wikipedia April Fools' Day Edit Wars | ||||
| Date | 20 March 2020 – 2 April 2020 | |||
| Location | Wikipedia WIKIPEDIA S, APRIL_FOOLS/APRIL_FOOLS’_DAY_2020 N | |||
| Caused by | Wikipedia tradition of bad jokes and other deleted nonsense on April Fools' Day, Precedent from past edit wars on April Fools' Day, impulsive behaviour | |||
| Goals | To cause shenanigans on the April Fools' Day 2020 main page. | |||
| Methods | Edit warring, vandalism, disruptive editing | |||
| Status | completed, war over | |||
| Parties | ||||
| ||||
| Lead figures | ||||
| Wikipedians who do not ever leave their bed | ||||
| Death(s) | A Bachelor | |||
| Injuries | The April Fools 2020 page | |||
| Arrested | User:OcelotCreeper (until April 2) | |||
| Fined | The person who was selling drugs and and ruined the city | |||
| Winner | User:PorkchopGMX claims the header | |||
| What a year. | ||||
April Fools' Day has been a Wikipedia tradition since 2004. In 2015, an editor changed the name of the miscellaneous joke section from "General Tomfoolery" to “General Jerryfoolery”, which spawned a short but friendly edit war that was repeated in 2016 through 2018. In 2019, the First Great Edit War broke out and over one-hundred changes were made to the title of the miscellaneous joke section. As the dust of the first Great Edit War cleared, the community could only wait and see what April Fools' Day 2020 would bring.
In the months and days before April 1, 2020, multiple edits were made to the documentation page for 2020. As the clock struck 12:00, pure chaos was unleashed across the page as editors, many of them quarantined due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic, rotated and skewed the page, copypasted the contents of other articles, spammed images across the page (many of them under copyright protection) and generally made the entire page an unintelligible mess. Some order was restored after the page was semi-protected a little after 3 AM UTC, but edits to the "General Tomfoolery" section title continued at a breakneck pace. By the time April 2 rolled around, untold hundreds of article titles had been posted and the Wikipedia community was left shaking its head at the utter chaos that had just unfolded.
Following this edit war, people agreed to prohibit edit warring and vandalism on April Fools Day pages,[1] and administrators are given permission to protect the April Fools Day page and block editors upon any further instances of edit warring and vandalism.
Below is an attempt by the Wikipedia community to document the events of that fateful April Fools' Day.