User:Cmadler/Elephant (wikipedia article) (Wikipedia article)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elephant (wikipedia article) was a Wikipedia article about the Wikipedia article about elephants. It was created on August 19, 2006, by User:John Kenney.[1] Because "Wikipedia" in the article name refers to Wikipedia it is a proper noun which should have been capitalized according to Wikipedia's Manual of Style,[2] so this article should have been named "Elephant (Wikipedia article)".
- This article is about the Wikipedia article "Elephant (wikipedia article)", for the article itself, see User:John Kenney/Elephant (wikipedia article); for the topic of the article itself, see Elephant.
In its original form, Elephant (wikipedia article) simple documented a joke by Stephen Colbert on his television show, The Colbert Report, in which "he advised viewers to edit the article [Elephant] to indicate that the population of elephants had tripled in the last six months."[1] Over the article's first week, additional information was added, observing that "Elephant" was "among the oldest" Wikipedia articles, with its origins "lost due to software updates".[3]
Approximately two months after creation, Elephant (wikipedia article) was nominated for deletion. Around the same time, it was listed in Wikipedia's "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense", copied (including the deletion notice) to the Uncyclopedia. Shortly before being deleted from articlespace it was userfied, and it remains in Wikipedia userspace to this day.