Uncyclopedia
From Wikinfo
- See also: Uncyclopedia: criticism
Uncyclopedia, "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," is a satirical parody of Wikipedia, although Uncyclopedia claims the reverse. The site was launched in January 2005 by Jonathan Huang and an unnamed individual known either as 'Stillwaters' or 'Euniana,' and claims to be a project of the "Uncyclomedia Foundation" - itself a parody of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The original self-proclaimed mission of Uncyclopedia was to provide a comprehensive source of misinformation, from a Satirical Point of View (SPOV), using the wiki concept. However, as the community grew, the content expanded to include many other forms of humor. While there is technically no restriction on the kinds of humor allowed, most articles are held to a general standard of comprehensibility and must appeal to more than just a small group of people. (See Uncyclopedia's Vanity Policy.)
Uncyclopedia's logo, a potato named "Sophia," is a parody of Wikipedia's globe logo. This potato is named after the "patron saint" of Uncyclopedia, though it is unclear as to whether or not Sophia is actually Italian film actress Sophia Loren, or simply a potato.
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Background
There is little evidence to suggest that Huang (aka User:Chronarion) started Uncyclopedia for any particular reason, other than the fact that no parody of Wikipedia had existed until that point. Some Wikipedians believe that Uncyclopedia was launched in response to a perceived increase in demand among Wikipedians to place satire and "nonsense" material, having outgrown their own "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense" page. However, there is almost no evidence for this assertion. Uncyclopedia was not promoted on Wikipedia itself, and was even attacked by some Wikipedians early on as being antagonistic to Wikipedia.
Uncyclopedia quickly outgrew its original hosting service, and on May 26, 2005, it was announced that Uncyclopedia would be hosted by Wikia, Inc., (announcement) then known as "WikiCities." Its license and ownership remained unchanged until July 10, 2006, when the uncyclopedia.org domain was formally transferred by Huang to Wikia, Inc.
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, Uncyclopedia contains roughly 20,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis (see the Statistics page and Wikia's "trends" pages for more up-to-date numbers). Indeed, the article count would be much higher were it not for the fact that as many as 30 percent of the site's new article submissions are deleted (or "huffed," in Uncyclopedia parlance) within 24 hours.
Content
While the majority of Uncyclopedia's content tends to consist of direct parody of encyclopedic subjects, recent trends have been away from articles about real topics in favor of articles that are, for the most part, either extended jokes or articles about wholly-invented persons, things, and events. For example, of the roughly 130 wars written about on Uncyclopedia, only about 20 of them actually occurred.
Various recurring jokes have gained a certain "faddish" popularity on Uncyclopedia. One of the most common is the made-up Oscar Wilde quote, usually placed at the top of an article (often along with several other quotes). As a result, the article on Wilde is now the most linked-to article on the entire website. For several months, Steve Ballmer "killquotes" were also popular. "Approved by" templates were popular for about two weeks, but continue to be used occasionally despite a general effort to stamp them out completely.
Oscar Wilde, meanwhile, has his own namespace, Wilde:, which currently is used mostly as a repository for fake-quote templates, but is also being used as an organizing point for a new effort to remove spurious and unfunny Wilde quotes from mainspace articles.
Less obvious tongue-in-cheek humor is also common. For example, the Chinese name of the People's Republic of China is considerably longer in Uncyclopedia's article than on Wikipedia's, but literally means (in Chinese), "The Communist Party of China One Party Dictatorship People-Cannot-Be-Master-Of-Their-Own-Affairs Republic."
Undictionary
At one point, Uncyclopedia attempted to cope with the enormous number of one-liners posted to it by establishing an Undictionary, an "ick!tionary" of misdefinitions covering a wide variety of topics. It was intended to parody Wiktionary, and while numerous definitions were posted and organized, the project failed to gain much user support and is now mostly seen as a collection of "garbage" (as evidenced by proposed logos depicting garbage cans). Currently, Uncyclopedia deals with most one-liners and "stubs" by simply deleting them immediately, or placing either a "No Redeeming Value" or "Expand" tag on those that look more promising. However, if abandoned by their authors, most such articles are deleted within 7 days.
UnNews
Uncyclopedia also accomodates parodies of news articles in UnNews, the "source for up to the minute misinformation." UnNews originally bore a strong (if not exact) resemblance to Wikinews, but has since evolved, gaining a great deal of user support and offering different features. It is now generally thought to be the most popular non-primary namespace on the website. Most, if not all, UnNews articles now have an available audio version.
MediaWiki
The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Wikipedia's conventions and general appearance. Namespaces and projects that are analogous to similar entities in Wikipedia include the Uncyclomedia Foundation (Wikimedia Foundation); UnNews (Wikinews), Unquotable (Wikiquote), Undictionary (Wiktionary), UnBooks (WikiBooks), UnMeta (Meta-Wiki), Uncycloversity (Wikiversity), UnSpecies/UnBestiary (Wikispecies), and UnCommons (Wikimedia Commons). Image description pages are 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":
Notability
Uncyclopedia has been referenced online in the New York Times (article), The Boston Herald (article), The Guardian (article), The Register, and the Taipei Times (article).
In other languages
Uncyclopedia has "sister projects" in 21 other languages. For example, Eincyclopedia (Hebrew: ????????????) is the Hebrew version, founded December 5, 2005. The word Eincyclopedia is a combination of the Hebrew word ??? ("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, a Norwegian version was launched, named Ikkepedia.
The French-language version, founded in June 2005 as the first in a long series of Uncyclopedia "Babel" wikis, is known as D鳥ncyclopedie, a "disencyclopedia" which purports to have been written by an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters. The site's logo is a die, because "d馱uot; is also French for "die".
The six largest Uncyclopedias, all of them having over 1,000 articles, are the English-language Uncyclopedia (roughly 20,000 articles), the Polish Nonsensopedia (over 4,000 articles), the German Uncyclopedia (over 2,000), the Suomi (Finnish) Hikipedia (over 2,000 pages in its largest fork), the Spanish-language Inciclopedia (over 1,100 pages), and the regular-script Chinese "fake wikipedia" ????(over 1,000 articles),???? the homophone of Chinese wikipedia ????.
| Uncyclop椩a exists in many languages: | ||
| ar: | ??????? | ???????? |
| ca: | [http://valenciclopedia.wikia.com Catal?lt;/span> | Valenciclop褩a |
| da: | Dansk | Spademanns Leksikon |
| de: | Deutsch | Uncyclopedia.de |
| el: | ???????? | ???????????????? |
| en: | English | Uncyclopedia |
| es: | [http://inciclopedia.wikia.com Espa | Inciclopedia |
| fi: | Suomi | Hikipedia |
| fr: | Fran硩s | D鳥ncyclop餩e |
| he: | ????? | ???????????? |
| hu: | Magyar | Unciklop餩a |
| it: | Italiano | Nonciclopedia |
| ja: | ??? | ?????????? |
| la: | Latina | Necyclop椩a |
| nl: | Nederlands | Onziclopedie |
| no: | Norsk | Ikkepedia |
| pl: | Polski | Nonsensopedia |
| pt: | [http://desciclo.pedia.ws Portugu곝 | Desciclop餩a |
| ru: | ??????? | ???????????? |
| sv: | Svenska | Psyklopedin |
| zh-tw: | ??(??) | ???? |
| zh: | ?? | ???? |
| meta: | UnMeta | Uncyclomedia Foundation |
| info: | Babel Project | List of Uncyclop椩as |
Also, the English version of Uncyclopedia has several articles translated to Engrish using Babelfish.
See Also
External links
- Uncyclopedia
- Uncyclopedia Featured Articles
- The Uncyclomedia Foundation's website
- Announcement regarding Uncyclopedia joining Wikia
- Uncyclopedia' article about its article on itself
- h2g2's Edited Guide entry about Uncyclopedia
References
- Parts of this article were originally adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Uncyclopedia", used under the GNU Free Documentation License.
