Witipedia:Be funny: Difference between revisions

This guideline describes what counts as good humour on Witipedia. It is the only substantive difference between this site and any other encyclopedia, so it is worth reading properly.

== The rule ==

'''The joke must be in the true part.'''

That is the whole guideline. Everything below is a consequence of it.

== Consequences ==

=== The fact comes first ===

Write the accurate sentence. Then see whether it is already funny. Most of the time it is, and your job is to stop decorating it.

* '''Good''': "Meredith's final report claimed 986 emus killed with 9,860 rounds: a rate of ten rounds per bird."

* '''Bad''': "The hapless soldiers hilariously blasted away over 9,000 rounds at the crafty birds!"

The first is a citation and an arithmetic observation. The second is a comedy voice, and it tells the reader nothing the first did not.

=== No signposting ===

Delete these words on sight: hilariously, ironically, amazingly, you guessed it, wait for it, and any exclamation mark outside a quotation. If the reader needs to be told a thing is funny, it is not.

=== No fabricated anything ===

No invented quotes, statistics, dates, studies or "some scholars argue". This is the line between this site and satire, and it is not a soft line: fabrication is the one thing that gets an article deleted rather than fixed.

=== One joke, then move on ===

A paragraph with three jokes in it has none. The wit should arrive about as often as a good lecturer's does: rarely enough that you are not braced for it.

=== Punch up, or punch at the situation ===

Institutions, bureaucracies, our own species and the writer are all fair targets. Individuals are fair when the funny thing is a matter of public record and they are a public figure in that record. Ordinary people caught in a bad moment are not material.

=== The dead-joke list ===

Jokes so common that they are now furniture. They are not banned, but they must earn their place:

* "designed by a committee" (platypus, and see [[Talk:Platypus]])

* "nature's X" for anything

* "hold my beer"

* Any construction of the form "X walked into a bar"

* "and then it got worse", except where it demonstrably did

=== Get out of the way ===

Sometimes the funniest available sentence is the plainest one. The [[Wombat|wombat]] article's best line is a table row noting that around 300 northern hairy-nosed wombats remain, followed by "the last row is the part of this article that is not funny at all." That works because the article stops being funny on purpose, at the right moment. Learn to do that.

== How this is enforced ==

By editors, on talk pages, with the same tools as any other content dispute. Maintenance tags exist for both failure modes:

{| class="wikitable"

! Template !! Use when

|-

| <code><nowiki>{{unfunny}}</nowiki></code> || The article is accurate and joyless

|-

| <code><nowiki>{{unverified joke}}</nowiki></code> || The joke may not be true. Treat as urgent

|-

| <code><nowiki>{{jn}}</nowiki></code> || Inline: this passage needs wit

|-

| <code><nowiki>{{cn}}</nowiki></code> || Inline: this needs a source

|-

| <code><nowiki>{{true and funny|source=}}</nowiki></code> || The funny claim has been checked and it held

|}

== See also ==

* [[Witipedia:Five pillars]]

* [[Witipedia:Verifiability]]

[[Category:Witipedia]]