Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2017 April 1

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April 1

Why the April Fools disruption?

I mean, I understand it's supposed to be a day where jokes run wild, but some of the stuff done on the day is borderline extreme vandalism at points. Why try to pull off all these stunts and jokes, when some serious risk is involved? —JJBers 03:05, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Extroversion. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:44, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

People who want to do dangerous stunta or commit vandalism will do so anyway, with or without the excuse of April Fools Day. There will be more of them today, because they think that it gives them a legitimate excuse. Wymspen (talk) 08:43, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1392) contains the first recorded association between March 32nd(?) and a day of foolishness. Blooteuth (talk) 13:46, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

What's with the question mark? March 32nd is a perfectly cromulent day. Along with January 0, March 0, February 31, and heck in astronomy when they run out of month they sometimes just keep going. (i.e. March 50 = April 19) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:03, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

March 24, 2016 + 1 day = April 7, 2017 Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:18, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Reminds me of a fix I had to make for "Next tip" at Wikipedia:Tip of the day/February 29. {{#time: F j|February 29 + 1 day}} currently gives March 1. #time assumes the current year when not specified so the old version worked fine if people only viewed the tip on February 29. PrimeHunter (talk) 14:50, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

When some admins think it's funny to make the main page look like the front page was written by a particularly immature 12 year old, it's not going to change. If they were clever jokes, that'd be one thing, but oh well.... Fgf10 (talk) 18:37, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

An April Fool joke that's too obviously fake, isn't much of an April Fool joke. The best hoaxes have "legs", such as the famous "spaghetti harvest" report. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:00, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Exactly, it's certainly possible to make clever jokes like that. Though IMO in this era of fake news it's still not a good idea. Fgf10 (talk) 19:53, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

I expect there are some who take The Onion to be real. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:19, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

I immaturely (but cleverly) inserted a prominent (but subtle) "gerbil" into Richard Gere in July 2012. It stayed there through April Fools' Days '13, '14 and '15. Even when it was removed, it wasn't discovered. With butt humor, either go big or go home. InedibleHulk (talk) 14:41, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

The trick to Wikipedia's April Fools jokes, of course, is that they're always true. The fools are the ones who think they're fake.

My favorite in this line was one of the "Did You Knows" that ran in 2010 :

Did you know... ... that T. rex survives underground in Kenya?

ApLundell (talk) 21:17, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

what kind of plp in Japan do origami, school girls? Old bored housewives, kids?

What kind of plp in Japan do origami, school girls? Old bored housewives, kids? --Dikipewia (talk) 16:50, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

All kinds of people. Please see List of origamists.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:05, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

plp??? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:43, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

plp is aka ppl, AUNT, ofc.--Dikipewia (talk) 18:55, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

ofc??? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:16, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

WASP.--WaltCip (talk) 14:04, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

You lost me at the bakery. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:16, 3 April 2017 (UTC)

You might be interested in [1] by David Lister about origami in Japan. Dmcq (talk) 18:01, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Who is in charge of hiring in a big organization - Human Resources or the person who wants an employee?

If a professor has a student volunteering in his laboratory, and the professor and student have formed a solid professional relationship, and then the professor receives a grant and wants to hire the student, then what can s/he do to give the student an upper hand when it comes to the human resources team of the university? Assume the student receives adequate marks in school, not in academic probation or anything. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 22:34, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

If there's a particular project the prof is working on, and he gets authorization to hire an assistant, then he could usually pick that person. On the other hand, the best he could do is give a recommendation for general hires, and how much weight that pulls depends on the university. StuRat (talk) 22:46, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

Universities are different to businesses. Professors normally hire PhD students with grant money and not undergraduates.
Sleigh (talk) 23:47, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

There are research professors who do research as the main part of their job. They may have students, but the students are not necessary. Though, they may help as volunteer assistants. 50.4.236.254 (talk) 00:16, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

In my experience as a student worker at a private college and at a state university, and as a faculty librarian at a private university who's sat in on the interviewing process (although I've not hired anyone myself), a faculty member who gets authorisation to hire a student will do the interview, and once he chooses a student, the student's application gets submitted to HR for approval (background check, confirmation that this person really is a student, etc.), but HR hasn't had the authority to do anything beyond saying "this person does [or does not] qualify to be hired". To answer the question in your section title, it appears to be generally the same idea with hiring for faculty positions in academia: most of the applications I filled out (dozens of them) instructed me to apply to the head of the academic department doing the hiring, because the decision-making was done by a committee from that department, and HR again was there to make sure that I was qualified to be hired. Some places instructed me to send the application to the HR office (I got the impression that this was often to weed out applicants who obviously didn't qualify), but since most openings for college/university faculty are filled with specialists, and since they have to hire people in tons of different disciplines, it's risky to allow HR to weed out anyone but the most obvious problems, simply because the department invariably will know their own field better than HR will. Still, that makes it harder when you're applying to a job and sending the application to HR, because you have to do the ordinary job of demonstrating your education and knowledge to the hiring committee without sounding like you're talking to the man on the Clapham omnibus, and yet you have to write simply enough for the HR office, since they're composed of omnibus-riders. Most of my job applications were in academia, and most of the exceptions were for public libraries, so I don't really know much about the workings of for-profit companies; they may be very different, e.g. the for-profit company won't care whether you're likely to get tenure, while it seems to me that academic departments tend to be more collegial than company departments in their decision-making (Dilbert's boss answers only to his own boss, while academic deans can't always make major decisions on their own), and yet they're more autonomous (an academic department can make a lot of decisions that don't need to go up to the provost's office, but Dilbert's boss has to go to his boss for big stuff). Nyttend (talk) 00:58, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

Anecdotal OR perhaps, but I can tell you how it worked for me - when I was a student, we were hired by our own professors/department to teach classes or work on research projects. We still had to go through all the human resources bureaucracy and sign all the paperwork as employees of the university and members of a union. It was more-or-less like any other short-term contract job (we got a T4 slip and everything - you know, for income tax purposes, whatever the equivalent is in the US). When I was a postdoctoral researcher, in that case I was hired by the director of the project who was a professor at a university. Technically I was an employee of the European Research Council (and not of the university where we worked, I don't think), but the professor in charge of the project was in charge of hiring. Human resources doesn't have any say in it, they just approve whoever the professor hires. Maybe it doesn't work this way for everyone, but in academia you might get a different answer for every school. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:40, 2 April 2017 (UTC)

In my own experience, I was called to an interview arranged over the telephone by an employment agency. The interview was conducted by the head of department. The acceptance letter was written by the HR department. I would imagine most large private companies work like this. 149.254.56.172 (talk) 10:41, 2 April 2017 (UTC)