Uncyclopedia

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Uncyclopedia

URL	http://uncyclopedia.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Satire
Owner	Wikia
Created by	Jonathan Huang and Stillwaters/Euniana
Launched	January 2005

Uncyclopedia's logo, a potato named Sophia, is a parody of Wikipedia's globe logo. It should be noted that this potato is not the same entity as the "founder" of Uncyclopedia, Sophia ^[1].

Uncyclopedia, "the content-free^[2] encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"^[3] is a satirical parody of Wikipedia, though Uncyclopedia claims the reverse. The site was launched in January 2005 by Jonathan Huang and an unnamed counterpart (known as 'Stillwaters' or 'Euniana'), and claims to be a project of the "Uncyclomedia Foundation,"^[4] a parody of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The original self-proclaimed mission of Uncyclopedia was to provide a satirical point of view (SPOV) in the wiki format. However, as the community grew, the content expanded to include many other forms of humour. There is no restriction on the kinds of humour allowed; however, all articles are held to a standard of comprehensibility and must appeal to more than just a small group of people.^[5][6]

[edit] History

Uncyclopedia was launched in January 2005 by cofounder Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) as a satire piece on Wikipedia, as a response to the demand in Wikipedia's "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense" page for a place to put their nonsense. However, it was not advertised at all on Wikipedia itself and became more of a place for small satirical essays on assorted topics.^{[citation needed]}

Uncyclopedia quickly outgrew its original webhost; on May 26, 2005, it was announced that Uncyclopedia would be hosted by Wikia, Inc.^[7] Its license and domain name remained unchanged. On July 10, 2006 the uncyclopedia.org domain was switched in ownership from founder Chronarion to Wikia, Inc.^[8]

Uncyclopedia's content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. As with other Wikia sites, the full article database is freely available for online download. As of December 2006, the English-language Uncyclopedia contains a little under 20,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis (see the Statistics page for a more up-to-date number).^[9]

[edit] Content

Screenshot of Uncyclopedia's main page on March 3, 2006 when it was changed to reflect a new version of Wikipedia's Main Page that was not yet in use. It also thanks its users for creating the ten millionth article, just after Wikipedia had created one million.

A recurring joke is that of misquoting Oscar Wilde — either with a well-known, but slightly edited, genuine quote designed to parody the overuse of quotes, or with a phrase completely different from his style. There is an entire lexicon of fictitious Oscar Wilde quotes, which has its own namespace, "Wilde:"^[10]. Additional people who are often "quoted" are Chuck Norris, Yakov Smirnoff (as Russian Reversal), and Some Guy.

Self-reference is another common theme in Uncyclopedia articles. For example, the rot13 page is written in rot13,^[11] while the iPod article has the second letter of every word beginning with "i" capitalized,^[12], and the Caps Lock page written in all caps. ^[13] It also contains complete nonsense pages with hardly any purpose, such as their page AAAAAAAAA!. There are also many references to “Kitten Huffing”; which is apparently a recently introduced alternative to street drugs. These pop up in the most unlikely places.

To cope with the amount of one-liners Uncyclopedia received, it established an Undictionary^[14], an "ick!tionary" of one-liners and "daffynitions" covering a wide variety of topics. It was intended to parody Wiktionary, but the project never took off, and is mostly seen as a collection of garbage (as evidenced by proposed logos depicting garbage cans). Uncyclopedia also accommodates news articles with its UnNews^[15], the "source for up-to-the-microsecond misinformation". UnNews originally copied Wikinews to the letter, but has since evolved to do things differently, and offers different features. For example, most if not all UnNews articles have an available audio version.

[edit] MediaWiki

The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Wikipedia conventions, which itself is parodied with these following analogies: Uncyclomedia Foundation^[16] (Wikimedia Foundation), UnNews^[15] (Wikinews), Unquotable^[17] (Wikiquote), Undictionary^[14] (Wiktionary), UnBooks^[18] (WikiBooks), UnMeta^[19] (Meta-Wiki), UnSource^[20] (Wikisource), UnSpecies^[21] (Wikispecies), Uncycloversity^[22] (Wikiversity), and UnCommons / Uncyclomedia Commons^[23] (Wikimedia Commons). Image description pages are also branded under Uncyclomedia Commons, including a logo mirroring the Wikimedia Commons.

Uncyclopedia uses MediaWiki to imitate Wikipedia templates, such as its Wikipedia template (parodying Wikipedia sister project templates), and its Endspoiler template, which looks like this:

For those without comedic tastes, the so-called-experts at Wikipedia have an article about: Uncyclopedia.

[edit] Press coverage

Uncyclopedia has been referenced online in the New York Times,^[24] The Boston Herald,^[25] The Guardian,^[26] The Register,^[27] the Taipei Times,^[28],the Apple Daily^[29] and the Arizona Daily Star.^[30]

[edit] Controversy

This article or section may be confusing or unclear for some readers. Please improve the article or discuss this issue on the talk page. This article has been tagged since December 2006.

Uncyclopedia has faced some opposition in the New Zealand Herald, where it was stated to be a "cyber bullying menace."^[31]

'Roy Kelly, principal of King's College, said the uncyclopedia website was "nasty", putting it on a par with text bullying and playground violence.'

Since then, Uncyclopedia has considered a no-vanity policy, whereas vanity has traditionally been allowed for schools and online communities (against the wishes of the community, as most see it as lacking in quality and now troublesome as well). Any pages created for the purposes of personal attack or bullying are removed as soon as they are noticed, as always; however, it is very difficult for administrators to monitor each page. As of July 2006, vanity pages that are questionable are either deleted or put under the care of one or more administrators.

As of the end of September, 2006, revised policy allows for the speedy deletion of vanity pages of non-notable entities. True to the traditional tongue-in-cheek style of the website, this policy was dubbed the "Codeine's Mum" policy, stating that if the mother of one of the administrators hadn't heard of the group or individual in question, they were considered non-notable and fit for speedy deletion.

[edit] In other languages

Eincyclopedia's gefilte fish logo.

Uncyclopedia has "sister projects" in over 30 other languages. The French-language version, founded in June 2005 as the first in a long series of Uncyclopedia "Babel" wikis, is known as Désencyclopédie — a "disencyclopedia" that purports to have been written by an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters. The site's logo is a die, because "dé" is also French for "die".

The Hebrew-language version Eincyclopedia (Hebrew: איןציקלופדיה) was founded on December 5, 2005. The word Eincyclopedia is a combination of the Hebrew word אין ("Ein", meaning "void" or "non-existent") and encyclopedia. Eincyclopedia's version of the Oscar Wilde misquotes seen in Uncyclopedia are the misquotes of the claimed Messiah Sabbatai Zevi, who is also represented as the founder and main writer (through telekinesis) of the site.

The Spanish-language version, Inciclopedia, was founded in February 2006. It was set up after a sudden increase in the number of incoming articles in Spanish at the central uncyclopedia, following the closure of the Spanish humor wiki Frikipedia due to legal issues with SGAE, a Spanish organization for the rights of authors, angered by Frikipedia's entry on them^[32].

The Japanese-language version, founded in May 2006, uses the name Ansaikuropedeia (アンサイクロペディア, the katakana transliteration of Uncyclopedia) alongside the alternate name Bakajiten (バ科事典, a pun on the Japanese word for encyclopedia, hyakkajiten [百科事典]) popularized by Japanese blog Ebunroku Kotonoha's Japanese translations of the Japan, Oda Nobunaga and Konami articles in March 2005. In August 2006, the Japanese name was changed to Happyakkajiten (八百科事典, literally meaning "encyclopedia of eight hundred subjects"), a reference to the Japanese expression "eight hundred lies" (嘘八百; uso happyaku). Its current slogan is "Quack Experimental Wiki 'Uncyclopedia'" (へっぽこ実験ウィキ『八百科事典（アンサイクロペディア）』), a homage to the full title of the Excel Saga anime series.

Unlike the Chinese Wikipedia, Uncyclopedia has two separate Chinese versions, for Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese respectively. The Chinese Uncyclopedias are called Wěijī Bǎikē (Trad: 偽基百科, Simp: 伪基百科), a play on the Chinese name of Wikipedia, "維基百科" Wéijī Bǎikē, where the first character is substituted with the character for "fake".

The ten largest Uncyclopedias, all of them having over 1,000 articles, are the English-language Uncyclopedia (over 19,000), the Polish Nonsensopedia (over 6,000), the German Uncyclopedia (over 2,900), the Suomi (Finnish) Hikipedia (over 4,000 articles in its largest fork), the Portuguese language Desciclopédia (over 2,700), the French-language Désencyclopédie (over 2,400), the Spanish-language Inciclopedia (over 1,900), the Traditional Chinese 偽基百科 (over 1,800), the Japanese (over 1,700) and the Russian Absurdopedia (over 1,000).

Also, the English version of Uncyclopedia has several articles translated to Engrish using Babelfish.

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Uncyclopedia
• Uncyclopedia Featured Articles
• The Uncyclomedia Foundation's website
• h2g2's Edited Guide entry about Uncyclopedia

[[Category:2005 establishments]]