Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 23:36, 19 January 2007

Uncyclopedia, "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," is a satirical parody of Misplaced Pages, and kicks wikis ass, 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," a parody of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Their logo is a hollow potato named Sophia, which is a parody of Misplaced Pages's globe logo. It should be noted that this potato is not the same entity as the "founder" of Uncyclopedia, Sophia.

The original 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. In addition, though all types of humor are welcomed, Uncyclopedia does not sanction articles or comments merely meant to be stupid or vengeful.

History

Uncyclopedia was launched in January 2005 by cofounder Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) as a satire piece on Misplaced Pages, as a response to the demand in Misplaced Pages's "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense" page for a place to put their nonsense. However, it was not advertised at all on Misplaced Pages itself and became more of 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. 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.

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 over 20,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis (see the Statistics page for a more up-to-date number).

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. Some of the most used names are: 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, which has its own namespace, "Wilde:". Additional people who are often "quoted" are Captain Obvious, Russian Reversal, Some guy, God, and CATS, Chuck Norris, and Mr. T. While in most cases these people appear in a good light there are others who are almost never seen well such as President Bush, Bill Gates, and Bill Clinton.

Self-reference is another common theme in Uncyclopedia articles. For example, the rot13 page is written in rot13, while the iPod article has the second letter of every word with "i" in it capitalized, the Mortal Kombat page replaces all 'c's with 'k's , the Boston page written as pronounced in a Boston accent, and the Caps Lock page written in all caps. The William Shatner page is also written as if each word is its own sentence. This is a parody on the fact that Shatner's most recognized character, James T. Kirk also seemed to speak that way.

Uncyclopedia often mocks and pokes fun at the reader, as well as many other unpopular and frequently ridiculed things. For instance, the category "Things you will never have" contains things such as "life," "fun," and "sex," and the article on the PlayStation 3 is in countless unflattering categories, such as "Stupid" and "Ugly."

There are also many references to “Kitten Huffing”, which is apparently a recently introduced alternative to street drugs. These appear in many articles which would normally have no references to drug use, and have become a recurring joke among the Unycyclopedia community. There are other pieces of random nonsense, such as the AAAAAAAAA! page, written entirely of capital "A"s, with matching AAA-themed templates and photoshopped images.

To cope with the amount of one-liners Uncyclopedia received, it established an Undictionary, 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. Uncyclopedia also accommodates news articles with its UnNews, the "source for up-to-the-microsecond misinformation". Much of UnNews has been recorded in audio format by site users, and is available for download on the site.

MediaWiki

The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Misplaced Pages conventions, which itself is parodied with these following analogies: Uncyclomedia Foundation (Wikimedia Foundation), UnNews (Wikinews), Unquotable (Wikiquote), Undictionary (Wiktionary), UnBooks (WikiBooks), UnMeta (Meta-Wiki), UnSource (Wikisource), UnSpecies (Wikispecies), Uncycloversity (Wikiversity), and UnCommons / Uncyclomedia Commons (Wikimedia Commons). Image description pages are also branded under Uncyclomedia Commons, including a logo mirroring the Wikimedia Commons.

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

Uncyclopedia also parodies many other Misplaced Pages templates, such as the citations template, which looks like this:

Press coverage

Uncyclopedia has been referenced online in the New York Times, The Boston Herald, The Guardian, The Register, the Taipei Times, the Apple Daily, and the Arizona Daily Star.

Controversy

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Despite its humorous premise, Uncyclopedia has faced some opposition in the New Zealand Herald, where it was stated to be a "cyber bullying menace."

'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. Keeping to the 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.

In other languages

Uncyclopedia has "sista 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 site's logo consists of a bitten gefilte fish covered by a slice of carrot.

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.

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 (バ科事典, a pun on the Japanese word for encyclopedia, hyakkajiten ) 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 Misplaced Pages, 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 Misplaced Pages, "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 20,000), 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.

References

1. "Content-free" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
2. "Main Page - Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
3. "Uncyclomedia Foundation - Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
4. "Talk:Sophia (Misplaced Pages's Entry)". 2006-07-08. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
5. "Deletion Policy" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-22.
6. "Vanity Policies" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-22.
7. Beesley, Angela (2005-05-26). "Uncyclopedia joins Wikia". Wikia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
8. Beesley, Angela (2006-07-10). "Wikia %26 Uncyclopedia". Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-08-20.
9. "Wikia Statistics". Retrieved 2006-07-22.
10. "Wilde:Main Page" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-22.
11. "ROT13" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-30.
12. "iPod" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-30.
13. "Mortal Kombat" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-30.
14. "Caps Lock" (Wiki). Retrieved 2006-10-24.
15. ^ "Undictionary" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
16. ^ "UnNews" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
17. "Uncyclomedia Foundation". Retrieved 2006-07-18.
18. "Unquotable" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
19. "UnBooks - Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
20. "UnMeta". Retrieved 2006-07-18.
21. "UnSource". Retrieved 2006-07-20.
22. "UnSpecies". Retrieved 2006-07-20.
23. "Uncycloversity" (wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-09-25.
24. "UnCommons". Retrieved 2006-07-18.
25. Boxer, Sarah (2005-08-25). "But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
26. Schorow, Stephanie (2005-04-08). "This wiki-cool Web site lets Net surfers define world". Boston Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
27. Schofield, Jack (2005-04-14). "Web Watch". Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
28. Orlowski, Andrew (2005-12-12). "There's no Misplaced Pages entry for 'moral responsibility'". Retrieved 2006-06-24.
29. "'Pastafarianism' gains prominence and support in intelligent-design drive". Taipei Times. 2005-08-25. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
30. "仿維基百科 走惡搞風". Apple Daily. 2006-09-12. Retrieved 2006-09-27.
31. "Online parody of Tucson not always funny, but interesting". Arizona Daily Star. 2006-08-18. Retrieved 2006-08-22.
32. Woulfe, Catherine ? (2006-05-28). "Schools face new cyber bullying menace". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-20.
33. Taken from Yahoo's cache after Frikipedia's closure. "Inciclopedia's entry on SGAE".

External links

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

• 2005 establishments
• Comedy websites
• Internet memes
• MediaWiki websites
• Online encyclopedias
• Satire
• Wiki communities
• Wiki parodies