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Whacking with a wet trout ortrouting is a common practice on Wikipedia when experienced editors slip up and make a silly mistake. It, along withsentencing 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 ofdisruptive edits, which earnwarnings andblocks.
{{minnow}},{{diet trout small}} or{{trout small}}.{{minnow}}.{{whale}}.{{multitrout}}.{{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}}.Trout slapping originated in 1995 withinternet relay chat (IRC).[1] While in an IRC chat room, the IRC clientmIRC would allow users to enter the command:
/slap Samwhich 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 troutThe trout as the standard weapon-of-choice for slapping users in IRC can probably be attributed to thesurreal humor thatcomputer programmers are known to appreciate. This particular phrase can be traced back to an old saying that some personal experience is "better than a slap in the face with a wet fish." A 1971Monty Python sketch called "The Fish-Slapping Dance" may have helped this phrase gain more widespread usage, even though this sketch did not specifically involve trout (utilizingsardines and ahalibut in addition).[2] Also, in theTintin books, the characterJolyon 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.[3]
This phenomenon proved to be inordinately popular, and so the "trout-slap" became anInternet 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.
