Wikipedia:Whacking with a wet trout

"WP:WHACK" redirects here. You may be looking for WP:Wikipedia is not Whac-A-Mole (WP:WHAC).

Not to be confused with Cod throwing.

Whacking with a wet trout or trouting is a common practice on Wikipedia when experienced editors slip up and make a silly mistake. It, along with sentencing to the village stocks, is used to resolve one-off instances of seemingly silly behavior amongst normally constructive community members, as opposed to long term patterns of disruptive edits, which earn warnings and blocks.

Example

Whack!

The above is a WikiTrout (Oncorhynchus macrowikipediensis), used to make subtle adjustments to the clue levels of experienced Wikipedians.

To whack a user with a wet trout, simply place {{trout}} on their talk page.

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• For newcomers (or for a less spammy version), use a {{minnow}}, {{diet trout small}} or {{trout small}}.
• For a styleable version that can, e.g., be floated the right of talk page posts, use {{minnow}}.
• For not-so-subtle adjustments, try a {{whale}}.
• For a group of users, try {{multitrout}}.
• Any Wikipedian who wants to advertise an openness to being trout-slapped can add {{trout me}} to the top of their user page for a topicon or {{Wikipedians open to trout slapping}} for a banner. For a button, see {{Emergency-user-slap}}.

History

Trout slapping originated in 1995 with internet relay chat (IRC). While in an IRC chat room, the IRC client mIRC would allow users to enter the command:

• /slap Sam

which would make the chat client send an action command to the channel to announce something along the lines of:

• Steve slaps Sam around a bit with a large trout

The trout as the standard weapon-of-choice for slapping users in IRC can probably be attributed to the surreal humor that computer programmers are known to appreciate. There is additionally an old saying that some personal experience is "better than a slap in the face with a wet fish." A 1971 Monty Python sketch called "The Fish-Slapping Dance" may be partly to blame, even though this sketch did not specifically involve trout (utilizing sardines and a halibut in addition). Also, in the Tintin books, the character Jolyon Wagg frequently quoted his uncle Anatole in saying that some situation was "better than a smack in the eye with a wet kipper". Asterix comics also feature copious amounts of fish fights.

In any event, this phenomenon proved to be inordinately popular, and so the "trout-slap" became a kind of Internet meme of the generation, though at that point only cyber-geeks were aware of such things. Trout-slaps have endured in the hearts and minds of those individuals to the present day, and since those were the people to form Wikipedia's early user-base, the trout made its way into regular use here—with the notable and possibly mistaken change in wording to "whack", which was here from the beginning, and went unnoticed long enough to become commonplace.

Today, getting whacked with a wet trout can be compared to when your mother said she was "hitting you over the head with a wet noodle", and it makes about as much sense. When someone does something inadvisable that they had the experience and intelligence to avoid, you may likely see the suggestion that they are "trouted"—or "trouts all around", as it has recently become more stylish to blame all parties in a dispute instead of one.

Versions

• By degree of trouting:
  • {{itrout}} – A small inline icon sized trout
  • {{Minnow}} – An even smaller trout, though still centered and nicely intrusive by default, but can be floated to the side on talk pages, and custom-styled
  • {{Trout}} – The original trout
  • {{Whale}} – For larger jobs
• With alternative formatting:
  • {{Trout small}} – A replacement reasonably sized, left-aligned trout, suitable for trout victims to replace a regular trout after getting the message. {{Diet trout}} is identical
  • {{Diet trout small}} — A smaller trout than {{Trout small}}
  • {{Troutalt}} – A barnstar-style trout-in-a-banner
• If you want to be trouted:
  • {{troutme}} – a small auto-trout icon for the top of your userpage
  • {{User slap me}} – a message indicating a user is open to being slapped with a trout, should they need it
  • {{self-trout}} – a {{facepalm}}-style trout for when you realize that you've done something silly yourself
  • {{self-whale}} – a {{facepalm}}-style whale for when you realize that you've done something very silly yourself
• Warnings for trout misuse:
  • {{OverdoneTrout}} – A response to use against Wikipedians who tend to overuse the {{trout}} template
  • {{Small Overdone Trout}} – a more reasonably sized, less-intrusive, left-aligned overdone trout, suitable for overdone trout victims to use as a replacement after getting the message
  • {{whalemeat}} – if the Wikiwhale is overzealously used too often
• For someone who doesn't like fish, but does like Monty Python, you could ask the {{colonel}} to stop things if they're getting too silly.

Real life trouting

• Grangemouth, Scotland – 15 May 2005. (The fish used went missing and was never identified.)
• Royal Tunbridge Wells, England – February 2006.
• London, England – 19 August 2006.
• Nyköping, Sweden – 17 October 2013. (A mackerel was substituted for the trout.)
• Accrington, England – 25 February 2014. (A bream was substituted for the trout.)
• Lufkin, Texas – 1 June 2014. (A catfish was substituted for the trout.)
• Sebastian, Florida – 22 April 2018. (A Big Mouth Billy Bass was substituted for the trout.)
• Warren, Michigan - 5 April 2023. (The fish was frozen, too.)

See also

• Category:Wikipedia administrators open to trout slapping
• Category:Wikipedians open to trout slapping
• Wikipedia:A Side of Chips
• Wikipedia:Oops Defense
• Wikipedia:Stop that, it's silly
• Wikipedia:Village stocks

Further reading

• Friedman, Linda W.; Friedman, Hershey H. (August 2002). "Computer-Oriented HUMor (COHUM):'I get it.'". Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York. #CIS-2002-10.