Uncyclopedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Uncyclopedia

URL	http://uncyclopedia.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Satire/Wiki
Owner	Wikia
Created by	Jonathan Huang and Stillwaters/Euniana
Launched	January 2005

Uncyclopedia, "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," is a satirical parody of Wikipedia^[1] The site was launched in January 2005 by Jonathan Zhichang Huang ("Chronarion"), a graduate student of computer science ^[2] and an unnamed counterpart.^[3] The Uncyclopedia logo is a hollow potato named Sophia, a parody of Wikipedia's globe logo.^[3]

History

Since January 2005, the site quickly outgrew its original webhost, and on May 26, 2005, Angela Beesley, vice president of Wikia, Inc., announced that Wikia would host Uncyclopedia and that the site's license and domain name would remain unchanged.^[4] Huang transferred ownership of the uncyclopedia.org domain to Wikia, Inc. on July 10, 2006.^[5]

Uncyclopedia's content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license^[6]. As with other Wikia sites, the full article database is freely available for online download[1]. As of January 2007, the English-language Uncyclopedia contains over 20,000 articles, making it one of the largest Wikia-hosted wikis (see the Statistics page for a more up-to-date number).^[7]

Content

Screenshot of Uncyclopedia's main page on March 3, 2006 when it was changed to reflect a new version of Wikipedia's Main Page that was not yet in use. It also thanks its users for creating the ten millionth article, just after Wikipedia had created one million.

Uncyclopedia has many people who appear on many pages either in the form of quotes, or references to them in other ways. Some of these people have gained an almost cult status with a reference to them on almost every page. A recurring joke is that of misquoting 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 lexicon of fictitious Oscar Wilde quotes.^[8]

Press coverage

Uncyclopedia has been mentioned 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."^[9] The column was then reprinted in several other newspapers, including the Taipei Times.^[10] Several other articles have been centered on specific entries on Uncyclopedia - most notably the article in the Arizona Daily Star, which focused on the Tucson, Arizona parody.^[11]

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^[12] and The Guardian^[13]. While most articles mentioning Uncyclopedia are specific to the site, there are perhaps just as many articles about Wikia and/or Wikipedia that just mention its name briefly. These include the editorial in Great Britain's Register talking about the John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy, in which Uncyclopedia was named only once.^[14]

Other notable articles featuring Uncyclopedia have come from the Hindustan Times^[15] and Taiwan's Apple Daily.^[16]

In other languages

Eincyclopedia's main page (above) as compared to Hebrew Wikipedia's main page (below).

Uncyclopedia has additional projects in over 30 other languages. The French-language version 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 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^[17], a Spanish organization for the rights of authors, who were angered by Frikipedia's entry on them.^[18]

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" (see 偽 in Wiktionary).

The Japanese-language version, founded in May 2006, uses the name Ansaikuropedia (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).

Other languages include Polish, Hebrew, Portuguese and Swedish.[2]

Controversy

Uncyclopedia has faced some opposition in the New Zealand Herald, where it was stated to be a "cyber bullying menace."^[19]

'Roy Kelly, principal of King's College, said the Uncyclopedia website was nasty, putting it on a par with text bullying and playground violence.'

One Epsom Girls' Grammar School student's name and cellular phone number was posted to Uncyclopedia without her knowledge, along with insulting language, although she stated that students commonly added full names and photographs to their own pages. The concern over use of the site, as well as the Bebo website, was also present at several other schools, including King's College, Auckland Grammar School, and the Diocesan School for Girls.

References

External links

• Uncyclopedia
• List of all Uncyclopedias