Uncyclopedia
Uncyclopedia, which aims to be the "encyclopedia of politically incorrect non-information", is a parody of Wikipedia, although Uncyclopedia claims to be likewise.
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.
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. There is an entire lexicon of fictitious Oscar Wilde quotes as well as an Undictionary, an ick!tionary of one-liners and daffynitions mocking everything from A to Z.
Other common themes include:
- Identifying laws of science and mathematics as theories or pseudoscience, while giving credibility to unscientific beliefs.
- Recreating the history of Hip Hop (See Uncyclopedia's Hip Hop)
- Crediting a historical figure with anachronistic history or ideas, and inventing a concept rather than discovering it.
- Substituting an actor or actress for their portrayal of a character in film or television (Mark Hamill was a Jedi, etc).
- Stating the events of a fictional work or idea as fact.
- Giving credit to actors, musicians, or performers as great influences on society (for instance, muppet Grover and former US president Grover Cleveland as being one and the same), while crediting political leaders, philosophers and scientists with more mundane activities.
- Swapping entries for similarly named entities (exchanging astronomy with astrology or scientists with scientologists, leaving the scientologists to worship beakers and test tubes).
- Citing anachronistic dates and times that would cause great historical conflicts and age discrepancies, including dates that have not yet occurred.
- Moving real things to bizarre, imaginary or completely nonsensical locations. In New York, Uncyclopedia claims "PBS broadcasts from One Sesame Street and NBC broadcasts from the North Pole."
- Presenting an article as encyclopedic and breaking its established tone by reverting to a commentary or criticism.
- 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. Carrying this same theme across multiple articles (from WHYY: "WHYY was created as a fictional, nonsensical parody of WHEN 6:20AM, an established commercial radio station in Syracuse, New York. Nominally WHYY serves the fictional state of Delaware...")
- 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)
- Surreal categorisation and tenuous 'see also' links, including an entire category of vast conspiracies (complete with black helicopter logo) and JFK assassination suspects chosen seemingly at random.
- Much of the material consistently follows a fictional alternative plot line which can be found here.
The site uses MediaWiki software to mimic Wikipedia conventions, such as the random stub disclaimer template:
| This article is a stub. The article submitter may also have been smoking crack. You can help Uncyclopedia by expanding it. |
which parodies Wikipedia's:
| This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
also:
which parodies Wikipedia's:
Main Page Anniversaries
There is now a tradition of celebrating various anniversaries (some fictional) with a Google-like reskinning of the Main Page. Examples have included:
- July 4 A "Simple" version of Uncyclopedia for Americans, featuring various (gentle) insults (including intentionaly bad spelling).
- July 30 "International Page Blanking Day" where most of the Main Page was blanked, as a homage to the vandal technique of blanking pages.
- August 1 "Swiss National Independence Day" The Swiss Main Page is used which has a distinctly Neutral/Financial theme.
These are general planned in advance and hidden (as much is possible on a MediaWiki powered wiki) as an appropriate Language Uncyclopedia Main Page (Uncyclopedia:Simple: being the Uncyclopedia Main Page in "Simple English", compare with the ) until being revealed on the appropriate anniversary.
Mission
According to the founders of Uncyclopedia, Jonathan Huang, and an unnamed counterpart, the unofficial mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide a SPOV, or Satirical Point of View, to life. In the wiki format, however, it frequently deviates from this goal, and produces somewhat humorous articles on all topics, most of which is not necessarily classifiable as satire. Humor of all categories enters the wiki, prompting an equally freeflowing response, such as the vandalistic classification of articles as "Childish Mysoginistic Humor" becoming an official category. In some senses, the site is a parody of itself, accepting inside jokes on its own being. An example is the "I burning your dog" article, which mocks the site's guidelines page.
Despite the open nature of Uncyclopedia, which began as a collection of vandalism, the Uncyclopedia itself suffers from vandalistic attacks similar to those of other wikis. For example, occasionally people blank entire pages, insert advertising statements, or add messages that promote certain agendas, such as spreading anti-Semitic remarks. The creation of humor turns out to be not entirely material to random acts of text insertion. Indeed, the effort required to write one article on the Uncyclopedia of good quality may be the same, or even exceed the effort required to produce a factual article on Wikipedia. Good humor may be more difficult than good information, as there is a correct, or publically accepted form of a fact, but not necessarily a universal joke.
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 Wikipedia, originally as a response to the demand in Wikipedia'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 Wikipedia itself, and grew into 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 [1], 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.
As of August 2005, the Uncyclopedia has grown to more than 10,000 articles in size, covering a wide variety of topics in every field of endeavour.