Uncyclopedia

File:Uncyclopedia logo.png

Uncyclopedia's logo, which is made from a potato to parody Wikipedia's globe logo.

Uncyclopedia, "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," is a comedic parody of Wikipedia, though Uncyclopedia claims the reverse. The site was launched in January 2005 by Jonathan Huang and an unnamed counterpart, and is a Uncyclomedia Foundation project. [1]

The unofficial mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide an 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.

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 anti-Semitism, 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 their standards,which are at times peculiar by any other standard. They also ban vandals and other disruptive users.

History

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Screenshot of Uncyclopedia's main page on January 12, 2006

Uncyclopedia was launched in January of 2005 as a satire piece on Wikipedia, originally as a response to the demand in Wikipedia's "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense" pages (themselves parodied in Uncyclopedia's True Facts and Other Deleted Prose 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, though not as a Wikicity. [2] Thus, its license and domain name remain unchanged.

Uncyclopedia's content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license. As with other Wikicities sites, the full article database is freely available for online download. As of January 2006, Uncyclopedia contains over 18,000 articles, making it the third largest Wikia-hosted wiki.

Content

File:Pick ass o.jpg

Screenshot of Uncyclopedia's article on Pablo Picasso with an absurd illustration purporting to be one of his self-portraits.

File:Uncyclopedia GWB Test.gif

Screenshot of George W. Bush's "Presidency 101 Global Test".

Uncyclopedia entries are often fictional, based loosely on reality but aiming to parody. For example, the Algorithm entry from Uncyclopedia says that an algorithm is a term for "Al Gore getting his groove on." The Al Gore entry states that it is currently unavailable, and suggests that Al Gore might need to re-invent the Interwebs.

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 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 widespread presence of these quotes reduced their comic value and they are now limited to only a few pages.

Common themes

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The United States according to Uncyclopedia

• Recurring jokes about Kitten Huffing, an "alternative to street drugs."
• Self-reference. For example, the article on nihilism is blank, the page on morse code is in morse code, the article on Leetspeak is actually in leet, the page on recursion redirects to itself, the article on Redundancy is extremely redundant, and the page on proper Wiki formatting is full of formatting errors.
• Identifying laws of science and mathematics as theories or 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 the deadly continent "Euthenasia".
• Turning one individual historical personality into multiple people (for instance, multiple incarnations of Jesus ranging from Original Jesus to Baby Jesus to Ultra Jesus to serve the marketing strategy of the Church).
• Fictitious "Worst 100" lists. These include made up movies, children's books, television shows, 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).

The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Wikipedia conventions, such as the random stub template message: "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."

In addition, image description pages are branded under Uncyclomedia Commons, including a logo, mirroring the Wikimedia Commons. [3]

Main Page Holidays

File:Uncyclopedia - Oscar Wilde.png

Screenshot of Uncyclopedia showing the site re-skinned to celebrate Oscar Wilde's birthday.

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: WikiTestament - for April Fools' Day the Uncyclopedia page was given an evangelistic skinning.
• July 4: A "simple" version of Uncyclopedia - for Americans, featuring various (gentle) insults (including intentionally bad spelling).
• July 30: International Page Blanking Day - where most of the main page was blanked, as an homage to the vandal technique of blanking pages.
• August 1: Swiss National Independence Day - the front page was edited to have a distinctly Neutral/Financial theme.
• August 31: Blogese Main Page - for International Blog Day, the main page parodied many of the perceived elements of blogs.
• September 12: 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: 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 Wikicities network.
• October 16: 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: Uncyclo Alpha - logo and main page reskinned to spoof Memory Alpha on their birthday.
• December 3: AAAAAAAAA!-day - everything on the front page is expressed with the letter A.
• December 25: 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: 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: Plain Text Day - The main page is reskinned to give the impression it is rendered using a text mode browser.
• January 28: 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.

These are generally planned in advance and hidden (as much 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 UK Guardian, The Register, and the Taipei Times.

See also

• Kamelopedia
• Encyclopædia Dramatica
• Spuripedia
• Category:Policies that do not apply to Uncyclopedia

External links

• Uncyclopedia main page
• UnNews: Your source for up to the minute misinformation
• The Uncyclopedia article about Wikipedia
• News article on Uncyclopedia's joining Wikia from Wikicities