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.
3 Hours before April 1st UTC, the other pranks section was pre-emptively renamed "The section name people will probably still fight over" foolery.
Also, 3 hours before April 1st, “Pre-April 1st pranks” was changed to “Pre-March 32nd pranks”, with several other variants intermittently appearing once April 1st hit.
A few minutes before April 1st, the
Template:AprilFoolsNotice was modified to contain a "training video", rickrolling whoever viewed it.
Post-April 1st
The "Final Prank" was made and immediately removed.
The result was time's arrow flies relentlessly. As the Wikipedians screeched, looking to banish the horrible year, the year continued on its inexorable path, bringing us all one step closer to oblivion.
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion was listed at articles for deletion, which then the nomination is listed at articles for deletion, which in turn got listed at articles for deletion, and so on. (Eventually the joke got stale and anything deeper than five got deleted per
WP:G6.
Shortly after midnight, “Pre-march 32nd pranks” became Pre-February 61st pranks, then Pre-January 92 pranks, then Pre-April 367th pranks, then Pre-April 732nd pranks, then Pre-January 18,352nd 1970, a reference to the
Unix Epoch.
We pranked ourselves thinking that this April Fools wasn't going to devolve into literal chaos within 3 hours.
Too many people are stuck at home right now, with nothing to do but edit war on this page. We are doomed.
An escape page was created to dodge the 3hr of madness,
here. (Archived. Do not edit.)
An editor at
Wikipedia:Reference Desk/Science tried to make other editors believe he actually created a quantum black hole successfully (with vert subtle hints towards April fools), and hoped for folks at reference desk going crazy over the creation. But
everybody thought the editor was talking hypothetically. Turns out, he goofed up fantabulously; and the joke was upon him.
Someone noticed that April Fools jokes are allowed on a large chunk of the site, except for this April Fool's page, where it is now
strictly forbidden.
Amidst all the crazy changes to this page in the first three hours, the Silly Things template, which is visible on this page, had an entry added for 1941 April Fools' Day. It lasted a full two hours, from 00:34 to 02:34.
Getting a bunch of Wikipedians to edit an article with jokes is very reminiscent of giving randos on a Minecraft server the power of console commands. All of a sudden it's raining monsters, houses are being cloned and superimposed on other objects, TNT is being spawned... good times.
There were lots of smart speaker-editing in that day.
People who didn't have a sense of humor wanted to maintain order on this site determined that turning the April Fools Day pages into an unintelligible mess is prohibited in the future.