Uncyclopedia, "the content-free[2] encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"[3] is a satirical parody of Wikipedia, although 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"[4], a parody of the Wikimedia Foundation.
The original self-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[5][6].
History
Uncyclopedia was launched in January of 2005 by co-founder Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) as a satire piece on Wikipedia, as a response to the demand in Wikipedia's "Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense" page for a place to put their nonsense. However, it was not advertised at all on Wikipedia itself and became more of a place for small satirical essays on assorted topics.[citation needed]
Uncyclopedia quickly outgrew its original webhost; on May 26, 2005, it was announced that Uncyclopedia would be hosted by Wikia, Inc.[7] 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 July 2006, Uncyclopedia contains over 17,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis (see the Statistics page for a more up-to-date number)[8].
Content
A recurring joke is that of misquoting 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. There is an entire lexicon of fictitious Oscar Wilde quotes, which has its own namespace, "Wilde:"[9].
Less obvious tongue-in-cheek humor is also common. For example, the Chinese name of the People's Republic of China is considerably longer there than on Wikipedia, but literally means (in Chinese), "The Communist Party of China One Party Dictatorship People-Cannot-Be-Master-Of-Their-Own-Affairs Republic"[10].
To cope with the amount of one-liners Uncyclopedia received, it established an Undictionary[11], 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, and is mostly seen as a collection of garbage (as evidenced by proposed logos depicting garbage cans). Uncyclopedia also accommodates news articles with its UnNews[12], the "source for up to the minute misinformation". UnNews originally copied Wikinews to the letter, but has since evolved to do things differently, and offers different features. For example, most if not all UnNews articles have an available audio version.
MediaWiki
The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Wikipedia conventions; which itself is parodied with these following analogies: Uncyclomedia Foundation[13] (Wikimedia Foundation), UnNews[12] (Wikinews), QuoteUnquote[14] (Wikiquote), Undictionary[11] (Wiktionary), UnBooks[15] (WikiBooks), UnMeta[16] (Meta-Wiki), UnSource[17] (Wikisource), UnSpecies[18] (Wikispecies), and UnCommons[19] (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[20], The Boston Herald[21], The Guardian[22], The Register[citation needed], and the Taipei Times[23].
Controversy
Uncyclopedia has recently faced some opposition in the New Zealand Herald, where it was stated to be a "cyber bullying menace."[24]
"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 which are questionable are either deleted or put under the care of one or more administrators.
In other languages
Uncyclopedia has "sister projects" in 21 other languages. For example, Eincyclopedia (Hebrew: איןציקלופדיה) is the Hebrew version, founded 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 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 Désencyclopedie, a "disencyclopedia" which 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 six largest unyclopedias, all of them having over 1.000 articles, are the English-language Uncyclopedia (over 17000 articles), the Polish Nonsensopedia (over 4000 articles), the German Uncyclopedia (over 2000), the Suomi (Finnish) Hikipedia (over 2000 pages in its largest fork), the Spanish-language Inciclopedia (over 1100 pages) and the regular-script Chinese "fake wikipedia" 偽基百科(over 1000 articles),偽基百科 is the homophone of Chinese wikipedia 維基百科.
| Uncyclopædia exists in many languages: | ||
| ar: | العربية | ويكيبيدي |
| ca: | Català | Valenciclopèdia |
| da: | Dansk | Spademanns Leksikon |
| de: | Deutsch | Uncyclopedia.de |
| el: | Ελληνικά | Ανεγκυκλοπαίδεια |
| en: | English | Uncyclopedia |
| es: | Español | Inciclopedia |
| fi: | Suomi | Hikipedia |
| fr: | Français | Désencyclopédie |
| he: | עברית | איןציקלופדיה |
| hu: | Magyar | Unciklopédia |
| it: | Italiano | Nonciclopedia |
| ja: | 日本語 | アンサイクロペディア |
| la: | Latina | Necyclopædia |
| nl: | Nederlands | Onziclopedie |
| no: | Norsk | Ikkepedia |
| pl: | Polski | Nonsensopedia |
| pt: | Português | Desciclopédia |
| ru: | Русский | Абсурдопедия |
| sv: | Svenska | Psyklopedin |
| zh-tw: | 中文(正體) | 偽基百科 |
| zh: | 中文 | 伪基百科 |
| meta: | UnMeta | Uncyclomedia Foundation |
| info: | Babel Project | List of Uncyclopædias |
Also, the English version of Uncyclopedia has several articles translated to Engrish using Babelfish.
See also
References
- ^ "Talk:Sophia (Wikipedia's Entry)". 2006-07-08. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "Content-free" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "Main Page - Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "Uncyclomedia Foundation - Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "Deletion Policy" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-22.
- ^ "Vanity Policies" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-22.
- ^ Beesley, Angela (2005-05-26). "Uncyclopedia joins Wikia". Wikia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "Wikia Statistics". Retrieved 2006-07-22.
- ^ "Wilde:Main Page" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-22.
- ^ Republic of China "People's Republic of China - Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
{{cite web}}: Check|url=value (help) - ^ a b "Undictionary" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ a b "UnNews" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "Uncyclomedia Foundation". Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "QuoteUnquote" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "UnBooks - Uncyclopedia" (Wiki). Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "UnMeta". Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "UnSource". Retrieved 2006-07-20.
- ^ "UnSpecies". Retrieved 2006-07-20.
- ^ "UnCommons". Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ Boxer, Sarah (2005-08-25). "But Is There Intelligent Spaghetti Out There?". The New York Times. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ Schorow, Stephanie (2005-04-08). "This wiki-cool Web site lets Net surfers define world". Boston Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ Schofield, Jack (2005-04-14). "Web Watch". Guardian Unlimited. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ "`Pastafarianism' gains prominence and support in intelligent-design drive". Taipei Times. 2005-08-25. Retrieved 2006-07-18.
- ^ Woulfe, Catherine ? (2006-05-28). "Schools face new cyber bullying menace". The New Zealand Herald. Retrieved 2006-07-20.