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Uncyclopedia

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Uncyclopedia
Uncyclopedia logo
File:Uncyclopediamainpage.png
Type of site
Satire/Wiki
OwnerWikia
Created byJonathan Huang and Stillwaters/Euniana
URLhttp://uncyclopedia.org/
CommercialNo

Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia, is a satirical parody of Wikipedia.[1] The website is a wiki that provides humor- and satire-themed articles. The site was launched on January 5, 2005 by Jonathan Huang and an unnamed counterpart.[2] The Uncyclopedia logo is a hollowed potato, a spoof of Wikipedia's globe logo.[2]

History

Uncyclopedia was founded on January 5, 2005, and quickly outgrew its original webhost.[3] On May 26, 2005, Angela Beesley, vice president of Wikia, Inc., announced that Wikia would host Uncyclopedia and that the site's license and domain name would remain unchanged.[3] Huang transferred ownership of the uncyclopedia.org domain to Wikia, Inc. on July 10, 2006.[4]

Uncyclopedia's content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license.[5] As with other Wikia sites, the full article database is freely available for online download [6]. As of April 2007, the English-language Uncyclopedia contains over 23,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis.[7]

Content

Uncyclopedia has many people who appear on many pages either in the form of quotes, or references to them in other ways. Some of these people have gained an almost cult status with a reference to them on almost every page. A recurring joke is that of misquoting Oscar Wilde, whose "wisdom touches on nearly every conceivable topic, often without consent...", 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.[8] Most of the articles are either completely fictional, or parodied to such an extent that almost little or no original factual accuracy remains.

Press coverage

Uncyclopedia has been mentioned in several well-known news publications from around the world, in addition to numerous local and regional newspapers and periodicals. In 2005, the Flying Spaghetti Monster entry from Uncyclopedia was mentioned in a New York Times column reporting the spread of so-called "Pastafarianism".[1] The column was then reprinted in several other newspapers, including the Taipei Times.[9] Several other articles have been centered on specific entries on Uncyclopedia - most notably the article on the Arizona Daily Star, which focused on the Tucson, Arizona parody.[10]

In addition to articles about specific entries on the wiki, several papers speak of the website in general - usually in a section devoted to technology or "the web." This was the case when Uncyclopedia was referenced in the Boston Herald[11] and The Guardian.[12] While most articles mentioning Uncyclopedia are specific to the site, there are other articles about Wikia or Wikipedia that just mention its name briefly. These include the editorial in The Register discussing the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy, in which Uncyclopedia was named only once.[13]

Other articles featuring Uncyclopedia have come from the Hindustan Times[14] and Taiwan's Apple Daily.[15]

In other languages

File:398px-WP VS Eincyc.png
Eincyclopedia's main page (above) as compared to Hebrew Wikipedia's main page (below).

Uncyclopedia has additional projects in over three dozen other languages. The French-language version 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, a pun on the French word for "die" (dé).

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,[16] a Spanish organization for the rights of authors, who were angered by Frikipedia's entry on them.[17]

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 Japanese-language version, founded in May 2006, uses the name Ansaikuropedia (アンサイクロペディア, the katakana transliteration of Uncyclopedia) alongside the alternate name Bakajiten ('baka' meaning fool, a pun on the Japanese word for encyclopedia, hyakkajiten).

The Hebrew איןציקלופדיה (eintsyclopedia) puns on אין (ein), a term of negation.

Other languages include Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian,Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Thai and even Latin.

Criticism

Uncyclopedia was critically described in the New Zealand Herald in May 2006, where it was stated to be a "cyber bullying menace."[18]

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

One Epsom Girls' Grammar School student's name and cellular phone number was posted to Uncyclopedia without her knowledge, along with degrading language, although she stated that students commonly added full names and photographs to their own pages. The concern over the use of Uncyclopedia, as well as the Bebo website, was also present at several other schools, including King's College, Auckland Grammar School, St. Edward's School, and Diocesan School for Girls.

As a result of this, Uncyclopedia adopted a policy against cyber-bullying. [1]

References

  1. ^ a b Boxer, Sarah (2005-08-25). "But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
  2. ^ a b Sankar, Anand (2006-11-06). "Surely, you must be joking!". Retrieved 2007-02-11.
  3. ^ a b "Uncyclopedia joins Wikia". Cite error: The named reference "joins" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  4. ^ Beesley, Angela (2006-07-10). "Wikia %26 Uncyclopedia". Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-08-20.
  5. ^ "Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Wikia. Retrieved 2007-02-11.
  6. ^ http://www.wikia.com/wiki/Database_download
  7. ^ "Wikia Statistics". Retrieved 2006-07-22.
  8. ^ "Wilde:Main Page" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-22.
  9. ^ "'Pastafarianism' gains prominence and support in intelligent-design drive". Taipei Times. 2005-08-25. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
  10. ^ "Online parody of Tucson not always funny, but interesting". Arizona Daily Star. 2006-08-18. Retrieved 2006-08-22.
  11. ^ Schorow, Stephanie (2005-04-08). "This wiki-cool Web site lets Net surfers define world". Boston Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
  12. ^ Schofield, Jack (2005-04-14). "Web Watch". Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
  13. ^ Orlowski, Andrew (2005-12-12). "There's no Wikipedia entry for 'moral responsibility'". Retrieved 2006-06-24.
  14. ^ "Meet the uncyclopedia". Hindustan Times. 2006-09-16. Retrieved 2007-02-14.
  15. ^ "仿維基百科 走惡搞風". Apple Daily. 2006-09-12. Retrieved 2006-09-27.
  16. ^ Arteaga, A. (2006-04-30). "Las enciclopedias wiki se extienden por la red". Diario La Rioja. Retrieved 2007-02-13.
  17. ^ Taken from Yahoo's cache after Frikipedia's closure. "Inciclopedia's entry on SGAE".
  18. ^ Woulfe, Catherine ? (2006-05-28). "Schools face new cyber bullying menace". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-20.
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