In the days (and month) before April Fools, the 'Do Not Edit' notice was modified from 'tomfoolery' to 'pranking', then to 'pranking/tom/jerryfoolery', and then to ' *foolery', and then a reference to last year’s edit war, before being reworded to avoid further edit warring.

Someone made a section that said 'bee movie' but linked to shrek instead.

It is left in a comment () until shortly before April Fools' Day.

On 9 March, the section was created under the name 'other pranks'.

18 11:50 PM to Midnight: Final ten minutes of April Fools Day.

Oh God, not another one! Part of Wikipedia April Fools' Day Edit Wars 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.īelow is an attempt by the Wikipedia community to document the events of that fateful April Fools' Day. 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. 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. In the months and days before April 1, 2020, multiple edits were made to the documentation page for 2020.

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 2019, the First Great Edit War broke out and over one-hundred changes were made to the title of the miscellaneous joke section. 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. April Fools' Day has been a Wikipedia tradition since 2004.

Reddit the great war