Pikipedia:April Fool's Day
Starting in April of 2015, Pikipedia editors agreed on making April Fool's Day jokes on the wiki. These pranks are made in good faith, and only exist to entertain the readers. Although pretty much nothing is to be taken seriously, none of the pranks are to go overboard, to the point of being offensive or destructive. Readers who came to the wiki to learn about a subject should still be able to, after all.
Normally, these are created by staff members, are placed on the wiki at midnight (GMT) of the first of April, and are reverted back after 24 hours. After being reverted, the April Fool's Page gets updated with information about the year's prank, in order to enlighten readers on what the joke was. For a list of steps to take before, during, and after the events, please read the talk page.
Editors can add to the joke articles at any time after April Fool's Day has passed, but they must have a good reason to do so. The idea of the joke and its core contents should be kept intact. For instance, adding an image to a gallery of funny images is all right. Changing the plot of a game is not. In addition, each article can also have extra contribution notes on its April Fool's Day disclaimer box.
The following is a list of jokes made so far.
2015
Bolbert
The Bolbert article is Pikipedia's first April Fool's Day joke. It details information about a made-up enemy called a "Bolbert", that is actually a description of Bulborbs and mimics, said to be quite elegant, when in reality, the images show Bulborbs in hilarious poses.
The idea for this joke article came from a post on Miiverse that, when shared, caused a lot of laughs within the editor community, half due to the incorrect name given to the Red Bulborb, half because of the enemy's face in the screenshot. The article would focus on a fake Bulborb-like creature said to be quite majestic, only to have the images on the page show hilarious Bulborb poses. The name of the invented enemy and the main image come directly from the Miiverse post. In this joke, Pikipedia does not attempt to mock the player in the Miiverse post. We understand that not all players are familiar with the names of the enemies, and as such, would not dare to acknowledge such player mistakes, much less ridicule them. The image and name combination however, were just too funny for the community to ignore, leading to the creation of this light-hearted parody enemy article.
2016
Pikmin: Color Splash
Paper Mario: Color Splash got announced in a Nintendo Direct not long before the time of this April Fool's Day. The trailer revealed that Nintendo plans to keep several of the features that made Sticker Star so controversial, which in turn caused a fair amount of controversy for Color Splash. Seeing this opportunity, some members of the Pikmin fanbase got together to discuss the idea of a mock Pikmin game announcement, based on what is known about Color Splash, with special care to all the controversial parts. The idea was to originally create an article of a game mocking Fire Emblem Fates, for the same reasons, but Color Splash was chosen for being more recent and closer to Pikmin. The plot and gameplay mechanics for this made-up Pikmin game try to stay parallel to the most defining parts of Color Splash, but at the same time, exaggerate some of them for the sake of humor.
Pik-Min
Some time before April Fool's, some NIWA members gathered around to discuss the possibility of a collaborative April Fool's joke. The premise would be that Nintendo announced a new franchise, the Nintendo Cinematic Universe, as a parody to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Like the latter consists of a collection of Marvel franchise films, the joke would involve a series of movies about different Nintendo franchises. Being a collaborative joke, other wikis would make fake articles about the Nintendo Cinematic Universe and whatever movie they wished, all keeping the same theme. Only SmashWiki and Mario Wiki joined in, besides Pikipedia.
The Pikmin movie in this line-up was decided to be a parallel to Ant-Man. Given that in both the Ant-Man and the Pikmin franchises, the human(oid) heroes are of a small size compared to their surroundings, and are able to control an army of colony insects, the connection was clear as day straight from the start. The similarity between the two series' names also made the final movie's name an easy choice: Pik-Min.