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Uncyclopedia, which aims to be the "encyclopedia of politically incorrect non-information", is a parody of Misplaced Pages.
Content
Uncyclopedia entries often are nonsensical, with little or no resemblance to reality.
For example, the Algorithm entry from Uncyclopedia claims that 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 Internet.
Geography is often mis-labeled, mis-described or mis-located, such as the entry for Saxony, which claims it is "a major city in western France near the Pacific coastal region of Spain". The Dominion of Newfoundland is declared a sovereign nation (Joseph Smallwood having been only joking about joining Canada on April Fool's Day) with the Babel fish its primary export.
A recurring joke is that of mis-quoting Oscar Wilde, either with a common phrase written to mock the style of the playwright or with a phrase utterly different to his style.
Other common themes include:
- Identifying laws of science and mathematics as theories or pseudoscience, while stating the events of a fictional work or idea as fact.
- Swapping entries for similarly named entities (exchanging astronomy with astrology or scientists with scientologists, leaving the scientologists to worship beakers and test tubes).
- Crediting a historical figure with inventing a concept rather than discovering it, citing anachronistic dates and eras, including dates that have not yet occurred or that cause great historical conflicts and age discrepancies.
- Presenting an article as encyclopedic and breaking its established tone by reverting to a commentary, criticism or black helicopter conspiracy theory.
- Creating fictitious US states, countries and entire continents which never existed, such as the deadly continent Euthenasia. Identifying real entities (such as the entire US state of Delaware) as being fictious entities, parodies, hoaxes or scams or moving real things to bizarre, imaginary or completely nonsensical locations.
- 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)
Much of the material consistently follows a fictional alternative plot line which can be found here.
Mission
According to the founders of Uncyclopedia the unofficial mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide a SPOV, or Satirical Point of View, to life. Although the site's editorial policies tend to be quite forgiving, Uncyclopedia's administrators are very efficient at removing anything not up to their standards, and banning offending users.
History
Uncyclopedia was launched in January of 2005 as a satire piece on Misplaced Pages, originally as a response to the demand in Misplaced Pages's "bad jokes and other deleted nonsense" pages (itself 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 Misplaced Pages itself, and grew into a place for small satirical essays on assorted topics.
The 10000th Uncyclopedia article was posted in August of 2005.
On May 26, 2005 it was announced that Uncyclopedia would be hosted by Wikia , though not as a Wikicity. Thus, its licence and domain name remain unchanged.
Uncyclopedia 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.
The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Misplaced Pages conventions.