Uncyclopedia
Uncyclopedia, "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," is a parody of Wikipedia, though Uncyclopedia claims the reverse (and correctly claims that Wikipedia claims the reverse, and vice versa ad infinitum). The site was launched in January 2005 by Jonathan Huang and an unnamed counterpart, and is claimed to be a project of the fictitious Uncyclomedia Foundation.
The unofficial mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide a SPOV, or Satirical Point of View. In the wiki format, however, it frequently deviates from this goal, and produces humorous articles on all topics, most of which are not necessarily satire. Humor of all possible categories enters the wiki, prompting an equally freeflowing response; for example, the originally-vandalistic classification of articles as "Childish Misogynistic Humor" became an accepted article categorization scheme.
Wikipedia is the false satirical version of Uncycolpedia as it tries to twist the truths discovered in Uncyclopedia in strange, disgusting ways. For example, remember that time you tried to rape a chicken? eh? Do you? eh? Well that's what Wikipedia feels like ALL THE TIME. Visit Uncyclopedia and save those innocent chickens.
Despite the open nature of Uncyclopedia, in which vandalism can be considered positive, the Uncyclopedia itself suffers from vandalism similar to that of other wikis. For example, occasionally vandals will blank entire pages, insert spam, enter actual factual information (considered one of the most gruesome and inconsiderate gestures possible there), or add messages that promote certain agendas such as spreading antisemitism, racism, and homophobia. The creation of humor turns out to be not entirely material to random acts of text insertion. Indeed, the effort required to write one article on the Uncyclopedia of good quality may be the same, or even exceed the effort required to produce a good article on Wikipedia. Although the site's editorial policies tend to be quite forgiving, Uncyclopedia's administrators are known to try to remove anything not up to the site's standards. They also ban vandals and other disruptive users.
However, silly vandalism on Uncyclopedia (for example, Adding "monkey" to every sentence) is sometimes OK to input on that site.
History
Uncyclopedia was launched in January of 2005 by Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) as a satire piece on Wikipedia, originally 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 grew into a place for small satirical essays on assorted topics.
Uncyclopedia quickly outgrew its original webhost; on May 26, 2005, it was announced that Uncyclopedia would be hosted by Wikia, Inc.. [1] Its license and domain name remained unchanged.
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 January 2006, Uncyclopedia contains over 17,000 articles, making it the third largest Wikia-hosted wiki.
Content
Uncyclopedia entries are often fictional, based loosely on reality but aiming to parody. Some articles are equipped with pictures which are either comic versions of the described item or an absurd illustration of the phenomenon.
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 as well as an Undictionary, an "ick!tionary" of one-liners and "daffynitions" covering a wide variety of topics, and UnNews, the "source for up to the minute misinformation". (The latter two parody Wiktionary and Wikinews, respectively.)
Steve Ballmer also became a part of a similar joke, where he was misquoted on many pages threatening to kill the article's topic, as a parody of his threat to "fucking kill Google." Another joke is a category for "Things George Bush doesn't care about", parodying Kanye West's comment on how George Bush "doesn't care about black people." Consensus was reached that the overuse and widespread presence of these quotes reduced their comic value and they are now limited to only a few pages.
Common themes
- Recurring jokes about Kitten Huffing, an "alternative to street drugs" (it spawned a tradition of using the word "huff" as a synonym of "delete" in relation to articles). See also: Chicken Huffing
- Self-reference. For example, the article on nihilism is blank, the articles on the binary system, Morse code, Leetspeak and ROT13 are all written in the encodings that are their subjects, the page on recursion redirects to itself, the article on redundancy is extremely redundant, the article on brevity has only two words in it, the article about backwards (or sdrawkcaB) is written and formated backwards, the article on alliteration is composed entirely with words starting with the letter "a", the article on hyperlink is entirely covered in hyperlinks, the vandalism page is highly vandalised, the article about spam is filled with SPAM, the article about the iPod has all the words starting with i capitalised on the second letter, like iS, the article on POV is filled with POVs, and writer's block seems to struggle with finding an original joke.
- Self-contradiction, such as the page on proper Wiki formatting which is full of formatting errors.
- Pages that are just plain silly and absurd in an unusual way, such as AAAAAAAAA! which could best be described as a nonsensical exercise in Wiki-formatting.
- Identifying laws of science and mathematics as pseudoscience (for example, claiming that air is a fictional substance, although the article can be seen as a parody of the aether theory), while giving credibility to unscientific beliefs.
- Creating new theorems based on non-mathematical entities, such as the Quaid Disaster Theorem.
- Stating the events of a fictional work or idea as fact.
- Or, stating true facts in a parodic or satirical way, such as in World War I (video game) or J.D. Salinger.
- Presenting an article as encyclopedic and breaking its established tone by reverting to a commentary or criticism.
- Creating fictitious US states, countries and entire continents which never existed, such as making Euthanasia a country (or rather, a city-state), whereas euthanasia is something completely different in the real world.
- Turning one individual historical personality into multiple people, for instance, several dozens of incarnations of Jesus (the "Jesii corps") ranging from Original Jesus to Baby Jesus to Ultra Jesus to serve the marketing strategy of the Church. Adolf Hitler is another historical person often duplicated.
- Fictitious "Worst 100" lists. These include made up movies, children's books, television shows, Mozilla Firefox extensions, etc.
- Fake Oscar Wilde quotes, including an entire page about them.
- Avoiding disambiguation, blending together different meanings of a word (one example being when the word the was made the featured article), or creating nonsensical disambiguation pages with completely unrelated links, including a self-referential page Disambiguation (disambiguation).
- Uncyclopedia's Zork project, a parody on the old Zork games which, like the original Zork Trilogy, consists of three parts or versions: Zork, Zork II and Zork III. It is almost impossible to win these games, as most branches lead to either an infinite loop or the player's death (almost always being eaten by a grue). It spawned a series of jokes about people and articles being eaten by grues. There are also many similar/spinoff games, such as Zork Abridged, Game (which parodies Choose Your Own Adventure-style books), and Uncyclopedia:Game:Game Online
- Russian reversal, a special way of speaking derived from Yakov Smirnoff's "In Soviet Russia" jokes.
- Creating fictional and often absurd "landmark decisions" made by the Supreme Court, such as "Raccoon Tail vs. Super Mario Cape", "Ketchup vs. Catsup" or "Pot vs. Kettle".
- Using "Newspeak" from George Orwell's famous text 1984 to place value on or rate certain pages.
MediaWiki
The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Wikipedia conventions, and includes many templates that parody the wording or appearance of Wikipedia templates, including:
- The random stub template:
- This article is a stub. The article submitter may also have been smoking crack. You can help Uncyclopedia by expanding it.
which parodies Wikipedia's:
- This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
- The wrong title template:
- The title given to this article is displayed incorrectly because computers are trying to take over the Earth, so pretend it says Correct title.
which parodies Wikipedia's:
- The correct title of this article is Correct title. It appears incorrectly here due to technical restrictions.
- Uncyclopedia's Wikipedia template (shown on the right), which parodies Wikipedia's sister project templates.
The Uncyclopedic answer to the Spoiler template is riddled with spoilers. The Endspoiler template, for its part, uselessly reads:
In addition, image description pages are branded under Uncyclomedia Commons, including a logo, mirroring the Wikimedia Commons (ex).
Main Page Holidays
There is now a tradition of celebrating various anniversaries (some fictional) with a Google-like reskinning of Uncyclopedia's Main Page. Examples have included:
- April 1, 2005: WikiTestament - for April Fools' Day the Uncyclopedia page was given an evangelistic skinning.
- July 4, 2005: A "simple" version of Uncyclopedia - for Americans, featuring various (gentle) insults (including intentionally bad spelling).
- July 30, 2005: International Page Blanking Day - where most of the main page was blanked, as an homage to the vandal technique of blanking pages. (Note: This archived version only has the opening text changed. None of the page is blanked.)
- August 1, 2005: Swiss National Independence Day - the front page was edited to have a distinctly Neutral/Financial theme.
- August 31, 2005: Blogese Main Page - for International Blog Day, the main page parodied many of the perceived elements of blogs.
- September 12, 2005: Uncyclopedia Plus! - the Uncyclopedia main page was given the "premium website" treatment, with several links urging for users to subscribe. The main page declared, "FINALLY! Now I can PAY for all of my Uncyclopedia fun!"
- September 19, 2005: Pirateopedia - logo is changed to "Pirateopedia" and main page has a pirate theme in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day; incidentally, Uncyclopedia was Slashdotted on this day, causing a webserver error where the pirate logo was circulated throughout the Wikia network.
- October 16, 2005: House of Pomegranates - logo is changed to "The House of Pomegranates" (showing Oscar Wilde) and site is re-designed to use his writing style to celebrate the birthday of its supposed "founder".
- November 22, 2005: Trekkiepedia/Uncyclo Alpha - logo and main page reskinned to spoof Memory Alpha on their birthday.
- December 3, 2005: AAAAAAAAA!-day - everything on the front page is expressed with the letter A.
- December 25, 2005: North Korea - Eschewing Christmas, the front page is transformed into a pro-North Korean propaganda page, including replacement of the Uncyclopedia logo with a portrait of Kim Jong-il.
- January 5, 2006: Uncyclopedia's First Birthday - The main page and logo are reskinned in "retro" (one year old) style to celebrate the anniversary of the site's founding.
- January 24, 2006: Plain Text Day - The main page is reskinned to give the impression it is rendered using a text mode browser.
- January 28, 2006: Victory in Euroipods Day - The main page is modified as a World War II Victory Theme, in black and white, and the logo has a large 'V' printed on it, as a symbol for 'V for Victory'. The reskin was meant to celebrate the end of a wiki-wide conflict caused by an administrator abusing his power to feature a stub of questionable quality for fun. Banned users involved in the conflict, which became known as the "Euroipods Crusade", were unbanned on this day.
- February 5, 2006: Uncyclopedia, Superb Owl Sunday edition! A tribute to the Super Bowl, with multiple references to Peyton Manning
- February 13, 2006: Turtleopedia, an unplanned minor reskin making fun of the latency issues Wikipedia experienced on that day.
- February 14, 2006: Emopedia, the "dark, loveless encyclopedia" - the main page is reskinned in dark tones and filled with phrases about loneliness and suicide to celebrate St. Valentine's Day.
- February 26, 2006: Uncyclopedia's Main Page is changed to mirror Wikipedia's proposed new main page, despite Wikipedia not yet having made that the official main page. According to the administrators, they have planned that as soon as Wikipedia makes the switch, they will jokingly accuse Wikipedia of having copied their Main Page design.
- March 4, 2006: Ewokpedia, the "IE-free Edit Wars encyclopedia" - a tribute to Star Wars and particularly Wookieepedia's first anniversary. The logo is changed to an image of the unfinished second Death Star, like the actual Wookieepedia logo.
- March 19, 2006: Return of the AAAAAAAAA! Day - all letters on the main page are changed to "A" once again, as the "AAAAAAAAA!" article is refeatured as Uncyclopedians' favorite featured article of 2005.
- March 30, 2006 - March 31, 2006: Uncyclopedia in Mourning - a death theme mourning the departure - not the actual deaths - of two established Uncyclopedians.
- April 1, 2006: iHumor - an Apple site parody, because Apple was founded on the 1st of April.
- April 20, 2006: Hitler's Birthday - the main page was reskinned and the Uncyclopedia Logo is replaced with a picture of Adolf Hitler as a baby. An article on the fictional computer game Holocaust Tycoon was used as the day's featured article.
- April 22, 2006: National Try To Assassinate The President Day - A large image covers the main page saying "This Site Has Been Shut Down by the FBI! You Can Click But You Can't Assassinate the President." Underneath this is a box made to look like a rating from the MPAA film rating system reading "Assassinating the President: Not a very nice thing to do". This is a parody of GameFAQs's April Fools joke for 2006.
These are generally planned in advance and hidden (as much as is possible on a MediaWiki powered wiki) as an appropriate Language Uncyclopedia Main Page (Uncyclopedia:Simple: being the Uncyclopedia Main Page in "Simple English", compare with the Simple English Wikipedia) until being revealed on the appropriate anniversary.
Notability
Uncyclopedia has been referenced online in the New York Times, The Boston Herald, The Guardian, The Register, and the Taipei Times.
Uncyclopedia has been seemingly excluded from Google.
Issues With Google
It is currently difficult to find a link to Uncyclopedia or any of its content through the search engine Google. The cause of this is not known, and inquiries to Google by Uncyclopediacs have not resulted in much information. The closest to an answer that Uncyclopedia has received was a form letter attributing the lack of hits to Google's search algorithm.[2] Such difficulties do not seem to be present with other major search engines, such as Yahoo.[3]
In other languages
Uncyclopedia has several "sister projects" in other languages. For example, Eincyclopedia (Hebrew: איןציקלופדיה) is the Hebrew version, founded 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 to the Oscar Wilde misquotes of 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. Similarly, Inciclopedia (started 10 February, 2006) is the Spanish version. At 2 March 2006, an unofficial Norwegian version was launched, named Ikkepedia.
Also, the English version of Uncyclopedia has several articles translated to Japanese using Babelfish.
See also
- Kamelopedia
- Encyclopædia Dramatica
- Uncyclopedian Wikipedians (Not surprisingly, there are more people in this category, given that Uncyclopedia has a running gag of alleged "hatred" towards Wikipedia, and pretend to have no affiliation with it.)
- Wikipedian Uncyclopedians
External links
- Uncyclopedia Main Page
- Uncyclopedia Featured Articles: List of articles featured on Uncyclopedia and considered to be of substantially higher than average quality.
- UnNews: Your source for up to the minute misinformation
- The Uncyclopedia article about Wikipedia
- News article on Uncyclopedia's joining Wikia from Wikia
- h2g2's Edited Guide entry about Uncyclopedia