I’ve enjoyed the TV commentary site TeeVee.org for several years, especially their annual April Fool’s parody. One year for April Fool’s, they did a parody of ABC’s web site with the premise that ABC was switching to an all-reality format. Another year, they parodied Salon.com, and so on.

This year’s parody was TeeVeePedia, a parody of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. The parody site was a real wiki, and they have left it up, live and editable, since that time.

I was looking at the site last week and happened to click on the list of “wanted” articles — articles that had been linked to but which did not yet exist. My creative juices were challenged and I must have done six or seven in about three days.

I thought some of them were pretty darn funny. But I was challenged to try to be funny in different ways. It’s stupid and repetitive for every entry in the parody site to employ the exact same comic technique. So I tried to vary what I was doing from entry to entry.

Well, apparently stupid and repetitive is what they wanted. I got a snippy note from one of the site’s creators telling me to be “less factual and more funny.”

So much for encouraging uncompensated contributions from your online community.