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'''Welcome to [[Witipedia:About|Witipedia]]''', the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, in which every joke has to survive a fact-check.

Everything here works the way an encyclopedia works: anonymous editing, revision history, talk pages, protection, rollback, elected administrators. The single difference is the [[Witipedia:Be funny|humour guideline]], which says that wit is welcome and inaccuracy is not. If a joke needs the facts to bend, the joke goes.
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== Today's featured article ==
The '''[[Great Emu War]]''' was a wildlife-management operation conducted in Western Australia in late 1932, in which soldiers of the Royal Australian Artillery were deployed with two Lewis guns against roughly 20,000 emus. The birds broke into small groups, outran a truck-mounted machine gun, and jammed the guns by simply not lining up. The operation was withdrawn twice. Major Meredith's own after-action assessment described the emus as facing machine guns "with the invulnerability of tanks", which remains the only known case of an artillery officer rating a flightless bird above his own weapon. ([[Great Emu War|full article]])

== Did you know ... ==
* ... that a '''[[Wombat|wombat]]'''<nowiki />'s droppings are moulded into cubes ''inside'' the animal, by two stiff and two flexible bands in the last 8% of its intestine, because cubes do not roll off the rocks it leaves them on?
* ... that the '''[[Mantis shrimp|mantis shrimp]]''', with up to sixteen classes of colour receptor, is about ten times ''worse'' than a human at telling two similar colours apart?
* ... that '''[[Boaty McBoatface]]''' is cited in ''Nature Communications'' for the first direct measurements of turbulent mixing in the Orkney Passage?
* ... that '''[[Project Pigeon|pigeon-guided missiles]]''' worked, and were cancelled because, in B. F. Skinner's words, "no one would take us seriously"?
* ... that a '''[[Tardigrade|tardigrade]]''' can survive the vacuum of space but dies after two days at 37.8 °C?

== How this place works ==
{| class="wikitable"
|+ The parts that are identical to Wikipedia
! Thing !! How it works here
|-
| Editing || Anyone, logged in or not. Anonymous edits record your IP address in the history.
|-
| Accounts || Free. After 4 days and 10 edits you are ''autoconfirmed'' and can edit semi-protected pages and use rollback. 30 days and 500 edits makes you ''extended confirmed''.
|-
| Administrators || Elected at [[Witipedia:Requests for adminship]]. They can protect, delete and block. They have no editorial authority over content.
|-
| History || Every version of every page is kept forever, with diffs. See [[Special:RecentChanges]].
|-
| Disputes || Fought on the [[Witipedia:Talk pages|talk page]], with sources, not with the revert button.
|}

== The one part that is different ==
Each article carries two separate ratings: '''was this helpful''' and '''was this funny'''. They are counted apart on purpose. An article can teach you nothing and be hilarious, or be immaculately sourced and completely flat, and the editors need to know which of those two problems they have. Thumbs down counts too, and it is shown. See [[Special:TopRated]].

== Get started ==
* [[Witipedia:Five pillars]] - the whole ruleset, on one page
* [[Witipedia:Be funny]] - the humour guideline, with worked examples
* [[Witipedia:Verifiability]] - funny is not a source
* [[Help:Editing]] - wikitext in five minutes
* [[Witipedia:Sandbox]] - break things here
* [[Special:Random]] - read something