Misplaced Pages

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Uncyclopedia is an English language wiki that features satirically themed articles as a parody of Misplaced Pages. It was launched on January 5, 2005 by Jonathan Huang, known online as "Chronarion", and a pseudonymous partner called Stillwaters. Its name is a portmanteau of the prefix un-, which negates the root word, and the word 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 created, with the project eventually spanning over 50 languages and almost 100,000 pages of content.

History

The idea for Uncyclopedia came from the English Misplaced Pages's now-defunct "Bad jokes and other deleted nonsense" page, where Misplaced Pages's editors would catalog vandalism they perceived as humorous. Johnathan Huang and co-creator "Stillwaters" decided to make a wiki with this type of content, and created Uncyclopedia on January 5, 2005. Four months after its initial creation, the Uncyclopedia database took up 90 megabytes out of the 100 megabytes of disk space alloted by the original webhost, leading Huang to search for a new webhost. On May 26, 2005, Angela Beesley, the vice president of Wikia, Inc., announced that Wikia would host Uncyclopedia and the site's license and domain name would remain unchanged. The first Uncyclopedias in foreign languages were created in June 2005. Uncyclopedia's growing popularity resulted in it being voted Wikia's Featured Wikicity for November 2005, despite it not actually being a Wikicity.

On July 10, 2006, Huang transferred ownership of the uncyclopedia.org domain name to Wikia. Wikia's stated pretext for this acquisition was that Wikia's users wanted to create Uncyclopedias in other languages, and Wikia was uneasy about doing this with a domain they did not own. The majority of Uncyclopedia-related projects in other languages remain hosted either as independent domains or as subdomains of Wikia.

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 nearly 23,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis. It also has the most active users of any Wikia wiki as of February 2008, with over 200 more users than FFXIclopedia, the runner-up.

Articles

Uncyclopedia's stated goal is to "provide the world's misinformation in the least redeeming and most searingly sarcastic and humorous 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 "Five pillars", Uncyclopedia has a core set of rules called the "Five pliers", including "Satirical point of view". Despite all the policy pages that parody those of Misplaced Pages, Uncyclopedia has two main rules: "Be funny and not just stupid," and "Don't be a dick."

The wiki 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 Uncyclopedia'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, 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. The phenomenon began with an article stating that inventing Oscar Wilde quotes was the “national sport of England”. An entire section of the site consists of nothing but the fictitious Oscar Wilde quotes.

Uncyclopedia administrators are challenged by a steady flow of articles that do not meet Uncyclopedia's standards. Much like Misplaced Pages, Uncyclopedia has policies concerning vanity articles, which are articles written by an individual associated with the subject of the page. 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.

Interior projects

As well as housing many articles designed to satirize Misplaced Pages-style content, Uncyclopedia also contains several secondary projects (known as 'UnProjects'). As of November 2007, there were 12 such projects, each of which specializes in satire of a different information style. Many of these are directly analogous 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 parody religion that worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The column was then reprinted in other newspapers, including the Taipei Times. The magazine .net featured an interview with Huang about Uncyclopedia in May 2007. 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 Internet. This was the case when Uncyclopedia was referenced in the Boston Herald and The Guardian. Although 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 Seigenthaler incident, in which Uncyclopedia was named only once. It has also been listed as one of the "Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites" in PC Magazine.

Other articles featuring Uncyclopedia have appeared in 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 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 main page. In a similar incident in November 2007, Uncyclopedia's article on Northern Ireland was criticised by Northern Irish politician James McCarry who branded the site "disgraceful" and vowed to, along with help from Moyle Council, "get it removed". Ardoyne councillor Conor Maskey and Portadown News creator Newton Emerson opposed McCarry, saying people should be more relaxed about the website. This story was reported in The Belfast Telegraph.

In January 2008, the Malaysian Internal Security Ministry issued a directive alerting newspaper editors not to trust Uncyclopedia. It said the article concerning Malaysia contained "untruths, insults and ridicule" and was demeaning to the country. Uncyclopedia's users found this statement more humorous than serious, and subsequently parodied the directive in an UnNews article.

In other languages

Uncyclopedia has projects in over fifty other languages. About half of this collection of wikis is hosted by Wikia; there are also two dedicated non-Wikia servers used to host Uncyclopedia-related content. The UnNews project has been replicated, under various localised names, in eighteen other languages. To coordinate these projects, the Un-Meta wiki was created.

Founded in June 2005, the French language version is known as Désencyclopédie. It presents itself as a "disencyclopedia" that purports to have been written by an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters. The site's logo incorporates a die, making a pun on the French word for "die" (dé).

Desciclopédia, the Portuguese language version, has just over 9000 pages, making it the third-largest Uncyclopedia. Founded in August 2005, it uses various domain hacks to name individual secondary projects such as Desnoticias («noticias» is "news"), Descionário (with «dicionário» meaning "dictionary"), Deslivros (for books, «biblioteca» means "library"), and Desentrevistas («entrevistas» being "interviews). These would translate into "UnNews", "Undictionary", "UnBooks", and the exclusive "UnInterviews".

"Uncyclopedia" is also the name of the German language version. Founded in August 2005, its logo is the English Uncyclopedia's logo modified to include a Pickelhaube. The logo formerly featured Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf. Like the English version, the German Uncyclopedia also has UnNews, UnBooks, and Undictionary, under the same names. UnBooks and Undictionary have the same logos as the English version.

The Korean language version was founded in October 2006 under the name Eonsaikeuleopideo (언사이클로피디어, Korean transliteration of Uncyclopedia). Once it used the name Geojit Baekgwa (Korean: 거짓백과), but was renamed afterwards to Baekgwae Sajeon (Korean: 백괴사전) by consensus. As of March 25th, 2008, it has over 1400 articles. It uses their own logo, different from most languages of Uncyclopedia.

Ansaikuropedia, the Japanese language version(Japanese: アンサイクロペディア), the katakana transliteration of Uncyclopedia). It was founded in December 2005. It has over 9,500 articles, making it the second largest Uncyclopedia.

Eincyclopedia (Hebrew: איןציקלופדיה) was established in December 2005 as the Hebrew Language version. The name is a pun on אין (ein), a term of negation. Its logo is a gefilte fish patterned similarly to the Misplaced Pages logo.

The Spanish language version, Inciclopedia, was set up in February 2006 after a sudden increase in the number of incoming articles in Spanish at the English Uncyclopedia due to the closure of the Spanish humor wiki Frikipedia. Frikipedia was shut down by the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, a Spanish organization for the rights of authors (similar to ASCAP, who were angered by Frikipedia's entry on them. Frikipedia was eventually relaunched, and currently the two wikis are in competition, with Inciclopedia claiming that Frikipedia is a crude rip-off and Frikipedia claiming that Inciclopedia is a cheap translation of the English Uncyclopedia.

Uncyclopedia has two separate Chinese language 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". Efforts by mainland China authorities to block access to these two wikis (as part of the Golden Shield Project) have been ongoing since late 2007. The English-language Uncyclopedia is also being blocked on mainland China, as of 2008.

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

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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