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•.">logo.png|frame|right|Uncyclopedia's logo, which is a potato named Sophia, is a parody of Wikipedia's Wikipedia:Wikimedia logos|globe logo. It should be noted that this potato is not the same entity as the "founder" of Uncyclopedia, Sophia •.
Uncyclopedia, "the content-free• encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"• is a satirical parody of Wikipedia, though . 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.
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.••
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History
Uncyclopedia was launched in January 2005 by co-founder Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) as a satire piece on Wikipedia, as a response to the demand in Wikipedia's "" 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.
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 August 2006, the English-language Uncyclopedia contains over 18,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis (see for a more up-to-date number).•
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Content
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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:"•.
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 beginning with "i" capitalized,•, and the Caps Lock page written in all caps. • It also contains complete nonsense pages with hardly any purpose, such as their page .
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, 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•, 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.
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MediaWiki
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The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Wikipedia conventions, which itself is parodied with these following analogies: Uncyclomedia Foundation• (Wikinews), Unquotable• (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 , 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, which looks like this:
aaa 1px; margin: 0 0 1em 1em; font-size: 90%; background: f9f9f9; width: 250px; padding: 4px; spacing: 0px; text-align: left; float: right;">
A8A8A8; border: solid 1px 9CAF92"> | Warning: The above text contains spoilers. It is now safe to turn off your computer. | |
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Notability
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.•
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Controversy
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. True to the traditional 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.
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Main Page holidays
There is now a tradition of celebrating various anniversaries (some fictional) with a Google-like reskinning of Uncyclopedia's Main Page. Examples have included:
July 4, 2005: - for Americans, featuring various (gentle) insults (including intentionally bad spelling).
July 30, 2005: International Page Blanking Day - where most of the main page was blanked, as an homage to the vandal technique of blanking pages. (Note: This archived version only has the opening text changed. None of the page is blanked.)
September 12, 2005: Uncyclopedia Plus! - the Uncyclopedia main page was given the "premium website" treatment, with several links urging for users to subscribe. The main page declared, "FINALLY! Now I can PAY for all of my Uncyclopedia fun!"
December 25, 2005: North Korea - Eschewing Christmas, the front page is transformed into a pro-North Korean propaganda page, including replacement of the Uncyclopedia logo with a portrait of Kim Jong-il.
January 24, 2006: Plain Text Day - The main page is reskinned to give the impression it is rendered using a text mode browser.
January 28, 2006: Victory in Euroipods Day - The main page is modified as a World War II Victory Theme, in black and white, and the logo has a large 'V' printed on it, as a symbol for 'V for Victory'. The reskin was meant to celebrate the end of a wiki-wide conflict caused by an administrator abusing his power to feature a stub of questionable quality for fun. Banned users involved in the conflict, which became known as the "Euroipods Crusade", were unbanned on this day.
February 13, 2006: Turtleopedia, an unplanned minor reskin making fun of the latency issues Wikipedia experienced on that day.
February 14, 2006: Emopedia, the "dark, loveless encyclopedia" - the main page is reskinned in dark tones and filled with phrases about loneliness and suicide to celebrate St. Valentine's Day.
February 26, 2006: Uncyclopedia's Main Page is changed to mirror Wikipedia's , despite Wikipedia not yet having made that the official main page. After Wikipedia made the switch, the administrators jokingly accused them of having copied Uncyclopedia's main page design.
March 4, 2006: , the "IE-free Edit Wars encyclopedia" - a tribute to Star Wars and particularly Wookieepedia's first anniversary. The logo is changed to an image of the unfinished second Death Star(Which actually has the current Wikipedia logo embedded into it.), like the .
March 19, 2006: - all letters on the main page are changed to "A" once again, as the "AAAAAAAAA!" article is refeatured as Uncyclopedians' favorite featured article of 2005.
April 1, 2006: - an Apple site parody, because Apple was founded on the 1st of April.
April 20, 2006: - the main page was reskinned and the Uncyclopedia Logo is replaced with a picture of Adolf Hitler as a baby. An article on the fictional computer game Holocaust Tycoon was used as the day's featured article.
April 22, 2006: - A large image covers the main page saying "This Site Has Been Shut Down by the FBI! You Can Click But You Can't Assassinate the President." Underneath this is a box made to look like a rating from the MPAA film rating system reading "Assassinating the President: Not a very nice thing to do". This is a parody of GameFAQs's April Fools joke for 2006.
June 6, 2006: - The main page is redesigned to look satanic because of the date being 06/06/06.
July 1, 2006: - The main page is designed to be in favour of Canadians and Bacon in honour of Canada Day.
These are generally planned in advance and hidden (as much as is possible on a MediaWiki powered wiki) as a user subpage or in the Babel: namespace.
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In other languages
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Uncyclopedia has "sister projects" in 23 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 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 Ansaikuropedeia (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 百科事典) popularized by Japanese blog ''Ebunroku Kotonoha'''s Japanese translations of the Japan, Oda Nobunaga and Konami articles in March 2005. Its current slogan is "Quack Experimental Wiki 'Uncyclopedia'" (へっぽこ実験ウィキ『バ科事典（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 Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia, "維基百科" Wéijī Bǎikē, where the first character is substituted with the character for "fake".
The eight largest Unyclopedias, all of them having over 1,000 articles, are the English-language Uncyclopedia (over 18,000 articles), the Polish Nonsensopedia (over 4,500 articles), the German Uncyclopedia (over 2,000), the Suomi (Finnish) Hikipedia (over 2,000 pages in its largest fork), the Traditional Chinese 偽基百科 (over 1,600 articles), the French-language Désencyclopédie (over 1,700 articles), the Spanish-language Inciclopedia (over 1,500 pages) and the Portuguese language Desciclopédia (over 1000 articles).
Also, the English version of Uncyclopedia has several articles translated to Engrish using Babelfish.
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