Misplaced Pages

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Uncyclopedia, "the content-💕 that anyone can edit", is a wiki that provides humorous and satirically-themed articles as a parody of Misplaced Pages. It was launched on January 5, 2005 by Jonathan Huang, also known as Chronarion, and an unnamed counterpart, Stillwaters. Uncyclopedia's name is a portmanteau of the words un- (a prefix that negates the root word) and encyclopedia. Its logo is a hollowed potato (named Sophia after the Gnostic deity) that serves as a spoof of Misplaced Pages's globe logo.

Originally an independent project, Uncyclopedia quickly outgrew its original webhost and changed its host to Wikia in May 2005. Uncyclopedias in languages other than English were soon created, eventually spanning over forty languages. Since some of these wikis were on Wikia, which did not own Uncyclopedia, ownership of the uncyclopedia.org domain name was transferred to Wikia in 2006.

History

The idea for Uncyclopedia came from Misplaced Pages's now-defunct Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense page, where Misplaced Pages's editors would put vandalism that they perceived as humorous. Huang and Stillwaters decided to make a wiki with this type of content, and created Uncyclopedia on January 5, 2005. After four months, the Uncyclopedia database took up 90MB out of the 100MB of disk space alloted by the original webhost, leading Huang to search for a new one. On May 26, 2005, Angela Beesley, the vice president of Wikia, Inc., announced that Wikia would host Uncyclopedia and that the site's license and domain name would remain unchanged. The first Uncyclopedias in non-English languages were created in June 2005. Uncyclopedia's growing popularity allowed it to be voted Wikia's Featured Wikicity for November 2005, despite it not actually being a Wikicity. Since Wikia's users wanted to create Uncyclopedias in other languages, and Wikia was uneasy about doing this with a domain they did not own, Huang transferred ownership of the uncyclopedia.org domain to Wikia on July 10, 2006.

Content

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 November 2007, the English-language Uncyclopedia contains over 23,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis. It is also has the most active users of any Wikia wiki as of November 2007, with over twice as many as Wookieepedia, the runner-up.

Articles

Uncyclopedia's stated goal is to " provide the world's misinformation in the least redeeming and most searingly sarcastic and humourous way possible, through satire". Its articles contain information which is spoofed, fabricated or parodied to such an extent that very little factual accuracy remains. In a manner similar to Misplaced Pages's policy of following a "neutral point of view," Uncyclopedia has developed two rules for users to base their writings on: "Be funny and not just stupid" and "Don't be a dick."

Uncyclopedia also has a system for reviewing articles for their humor, grammar/spelling, use of images, and overall presentation, named Pee Review to parody Misplaced Pages's article review service Peer Review. Writers post their articles on the Pee Review project page and wait for willing users to review it using a specially developed template.

One feature of Unyclopedia's articles is the presence of quotes, which are often attributed to a person or other entity. Some of these individuals have gained an in-joke status with a reference to at least one of them on almost every page. The most recurrent of these is of inventing quotes that are "said" by 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 section of the site constisting of nothing but the fictitious Oscar Wilde quotes. One of the biggest challenges that the administrators of Uncyclopedia face is the constant steady flow of articles that do not meet Uncyclopedia's standards. A specific example is that of articles written for cyber-bullying purposes. Much like Misplaced Pages, Uncyclopedia has policies concerning vanity articles, and articles that are short and make little sense. Originally, vanity articles were welcomed as long as they were humorous. However, many of these articles degenerated into flamewars, and creation of vanity pages was therefore disallowed. Attack pages and clear vanity pages are now deleted on sight, leading to the deletion of many new articles.

Other projects

As well as housing many articles designed to satirize Misplaced Pages-style content, Uncyclopedia also hosts several other projects (known as 'UnProjects'). As of November 2007, there were twelve such projects, each of which specializes in satire of a different information style. Many of these are direct analogues to Misplaced Pages's sister projects.

Press coverage

Uncyclopedia has been referenced in several well-known news publications from around the world, in addition to numerous local and regional newspapers and periodicals. In 2005, the Flying Spaghetti Monster entry from Uncyclopedia was mentioned in a New York Times column reporting the spread of so-called "Pastafarianism". The column was then reprinted in several other newspapers, including the Taipei Times. A number of other articles have been centred on specific entries on Uncyclopedia - most notably the article in the Arizona Daily Star, which focused on the Tucson, Arizona parody and the article in the Cyprus Mail, which focused on the Cyprus article .

In addition to articles about specific entries on the wiki, several papers speak of the website in general - usually in a section devoted to technology or "the web." This was the case when Uncyclopedia was referenced in the Boston Herald and The Guardian. While most articles mentioning Uncyclopedia are specific to the site, there are other articles about Wikia or Misplaced Pages that just mention its name briefly. These include the editorial in The Register discussing the John Seigenthaler Sr. Misplaced Pages biography controversy, in which Uncyclopedia was named only once. It has also been listed as one of the top 100 undiscovered sites on PC Magazine.

Other articles featuring Uncyclopedia have come from the Hindustan Times and Taiwan's Apple Daily.

Criticism

In May 2006, the New Zealand Herald reported on school officials, including the headmaster of King's College, stating that Uncyclopedia and Bebo were "cyber bullying menace." This was prompted by one Epsom Girls' Grammar School student's name and cellular phone number, along with a degrading message, being posted to Uncyclopedia without her knowledge. The individual in question stated that students commonly added full names and photographs to their own pages, drawing warranted concern from several schooling establishments. The report contributed to the imposition of the aforementioned vanity policies, which were only loosely enforced beforehand.

In June 2007, the Uncyclopedia article on The Lake District was criticised as being 'offensive' by councillors and Tourism bosses, who called for stricter regulations on the site. The story was reported in British local newspaper the North-West Evening Mail, but no policy changes were made as a result of this. In fact, the publicity generated by the issue prompted the Lake District article to be featured on Uncyclopedia's front page. In a similar incident in November 2007, Uncyclopedia's article on Northern Ireland was criticised by Ulster politician James McCarry who branded the site "disgraceful" and vowed to, along with help from Moyle Council, "get it removed". This story was reported in the Belfast Telegraph.

In other languages

Uncyclopedia has additional projects in over forty other languages. Many of these wikis are hosted by Wikia. The Uncyclomedia UnMeta-Wiki was created to coordinate these projects.

The French-language version, founded in June 2005, 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, a pun on the French word for "die" (dé).

The Japanese-language version, founded in December 2005, uses the name Ansaikuropedia (アンサイクロペディア, the katakana transliteration of Uncyclopedia). It has over 8,000 articles, making it the second largest Uncyclopedia.

The Hebrew version, founded in December 2005, uses the name איןציקלופדיה (eincyclopedia) which puns on אין (ein), a term of negation.

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 English Uncyclopedia, following the closure of the Spanish humor wiki Frikipedia due to legal issues with the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, a Spanish organization for the rights of authors, who were angered by Frikipedia's entry on them.

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 Finnish version, Hikipedia, is a pun on the Finnish word for sweat, "hiki", and Misplaced Pages. Hikipedia's logo is a drawing of a middle finger. A subset of the wiki, Hömppäpedia, was created specifically for articles about invented subjects.

Other languages include Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, Thai, Ukrainian, Yiddish, and even Latin.

References

1. ^ Boxer, Sarah (2005-08-25). "But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
2. ^ "Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Wikia. Retrieved 2007-11-15.
3. "User:Chronarion". Retrieved 2007-11-03.
4. "User:Stillwaters". Retrieved 2007-11-03.
5. ^ Sankar, Anand (2006-11-06). "Surely, you must be joking!". Retrieved 2007-02-11.
6. ^ "The brains behind Uncyclopedia". .net. 2007-05-03. Retrieved 2007-11-19.
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.
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27. "'Pastafarianism' gains prominence and support in intelligent-design drive". Taipei Times. 2005-08-25. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
28. "Online parody of Tucson not always funny, but interesting". Arizona Daily Star. 2006-08-18. Retrieved 2006-08-22.
29. Christou, Jean (2007). "Cyprus that great and peaceful island". Cyprus Mail. Retrieved 2007-11-06.
30. Schorow, Stephanie (2005-04-08). "This wiki-cool Web site lets Net surfers define world". Boston Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
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32. Orlowski, Andrew (2005-12-12). "There's no Misplaced Pages entry for 'moral responsibility'". Retrieved 2006-06-24.
33. "Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites - Info, Reference, and Search". PC Magazine. Retrieved 2007-10-20.
34. "Meet the uncyclopedia". Hindustan Times. 2006-09-16. Retrieved 2007-02-14.
35. "仿維基百科 走惡搞風". Apple Daily. 2006-09-12. Retrieved 2006-09-27.
36. Woulfe, Catherine (2006-05-28). "Schools face new cyber bullying menace". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-20.
37. "Forum:We're a cyber-bullying menace" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2007-11-26.
38. "What do they know?". North-West Evening Mail. 2007-06-11. Retrieved 2007-11-08.
39. "The Lake District" (Website). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2007-11-08.
40. Henry, Lesley-Anne (2007). "War of words over Ulster 'Uncyclopedia'". Belfast Telegraph. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
41. http://uncyclopedia.info/project:WikiNode
42. "UnMeta:About" (Wiki). Uncyclomedia UnMeta-Wiki. Retrieved 2007-11-17.
43. "Désencyclopédie" (Wiki). Wikia. Retrieved 2007-11-21.
44. "Aide:HowTo" (Wiki). Désencyclopédie (in French). Retrieved 2007-11-01.
45. "アンサイクロペディア" (Wiki). Ansaikuropedia (in Japanese). Retrieved 2007-11-24.
46. "Special:Statistics". Ansaikuropedia (in Japanese). Retrieved 2007-11-17.
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50. Arteaga, A. (2006-04-30). "Las enciclopedias wiki se extienden por la red". Diario La Rioja. Retrieved 2007-02-13.
51. "Foorumi:Uusi logo?". Hikipedia (in Finnish). Retrieved 2007-11-21.
52. "Hömppäpedia:Etusivu" (Wiki). Hikipedia (in Finnish). Retrieved 2007-11-21.
53. "Foorumi:Hömppäartikkeleille oma nimiavaruus?" (Wiki). Hikipedia (in Finnish). Retrieved 2007-11-21.
54. "Uncyclopedia:List of Uncyclopedias" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2007-11-08.

External links

• Uncyclopedia
• List of Wikia Uncyclopedias
• List of Uncyclopedias

• Websites
• Comedy websites
• MediaWiki websites
• Online encyclopedias
• 💕s
• Satire
• Wiki communities
• Wikis
• Creative Commons-licensed works
• Internet properties established in 2005