named to Parody Wikipedia's Globe Logo .]]
, "the .
The unofficial mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide a SPOV, or " became an accepted article categorization scheme.
Despite the open nature of Uncyclopedia, in which Vandalism can be considered positive, the Uncyclopedia itself suffers from vandalism similar to that of other wikis. For example, occasionally vandals will blank entire pages, insert Spam , enter actual factual information (considered one of the most gruesome and inconsiderate gestures possible there), or add messages that promote certain agendas such as spreading Antisemitism , Racism , and Homophobia . 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 good article on Wikipedia. Although the site's editorial policies tend to be quite forgiving, Uncyclopedia's administrators are known to try to remove anything not up to the site's standards. They also ban vandals and other disruptive users.
, 2006 . It has been changed to reflect a new version of Wikipedia's Main Page (which was not even in use at the time). It also thanks its users for creating the ''ten'' millionth article, just after Wikipedia had created ''one'' million.]]
Uncyclopedia was launched in January of 2005 by Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) as a satire piece on Wikipedia, originally 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 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, Inc. . {Link without Title} Its license and domain name remained unchanged.
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 January 2006, Uncyclopedia contains over 17,000 articles, making it the third largest Wikia-hosted wiki.
with an absurd illustration purporting to be one of his self-portraits.]]
Uncyclopedia entries are often Fiction al, based loosely on reality but aiming to Parody . Some articles are equipped with pictures which are either comic versions of the described item or an absurd illustration of the phenomenon.
A recurring , the "source for up to the minute Misinformation ". (The latter two parody Wiktionary and Wikinews , respectively.)
Steve Ballmer also became a part of a similar joke, where he was misquoted on many pages threatening to kill the article's topic, as a parody of his threat to "fucking kill Google ." Another joke is a category for "Things George Bush doesn't care about", parodying Kanye West 's comment on how George Bush "doesn't care about black people." Consensus was reached that the overuse and widespread presence of these quotes reduced their comic value and they are now limited to only a few pages.
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"
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In addition, image description pages are branded under , including a logo, mirroring the ).
's
Birthday .]]
There is now a tradition of celebrating various anniversaries (some fictional) with a . Examples have included:
- ''' - for April Fools' Day the Uncyclopedia page was given an evangelistic skinning.
- ''' - for Americans , featuring various (gentle) insults (including intentionally bad spelling).
- to the vandal technique of blanking pages. (Note: This archived version only has the opening text changed. None of the page is blanked.)
- ''' - the front page was edited to have a distinctly Neutral / Financial theme.
- ''' - for International Blog Day , the main page parodied many of the perceived elements of blogs.
- ''' - 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!"
- ''' - logo is changed to "Pirateopedia" and main page has a Pirate theme in honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day ; incidentally, Uncyclopedia was Slashdotted on this day, causing a webserver error where the pirate logo was circulated throughout the Wikia network.
- .
- ''' - logo and main page reskinned to spoof Memory Alpha on their birthday.
- '''-day - everything on the front page is expressed with the letter A .
- ''' - 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.
- ''' - The main page and logo are reskinned in "retro" (one year old) style to celebrate the anniversary of the site's founding.
- ''' - The main page is reskinned to give the impression it is rendered using a text mode browser.
- ''' - 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.
- ''' A tribute to the Super Bowl, with multiple references to Peyton Manning
- February 13 , 2006: , an unplanned minor reskin making fun of the latency issues Wikipedia experienced on that day.
- ''', 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. According to the administrators, they have planned that as soon as Wikipedia makes the switch, they will jokingly accuse Wikipedia of having copied their Main Page design.
- .
- ''' - 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.
- ''' - a death theme mourning the departure - not the actual deaths - of two established Uncyclopedians.
- ''' - an Apple site parody, because Apple was founded on the 1st of April.
- was used as the day's featured article.
- 's April Fools joke for 2006.
These are generally planned in advance and hidden (as much as is possible on a ) until being revealed on the appropriate anniversary.
Uncyclopedia has been referenced online in the
New York Times ,
The Boston Herald ,
The Guardian , The Register, and the
Taipei Times .
Uncyclopedia has been .
It is currently difficult to find a link to Uncyclopedia or any of its content through the search engine
Google . The cause of this is not known, and inquiries to Google by Uncyclopediacs have not resulted in much information. The closest to an answer that Uncyclopedia has received was a
Form Letter attributing the lack of hits to Google's search algorithm.
Such difficulties do not seem to be present with other major search engines, such as Yahoo.[http://uncyclopedia.org/index.php?title=Forum:Google_Banned_Uncyclopedia%3F&t=20060414171049
Uncyclopedia has several "sister projects" in other languages. For example, (
2006 , an unofficial Norwegian version was launched, named
Ikkepedia .
Also, the English version of Uncyclopedia has several articles translated to Japanese using
Babelfish .
- Kamelopedia
- Encyclopædia Dramatica
- (Not surprisingly, there are more people in this category, given that Uncyclopedia has a running gag of alleged "hatred" towards Wikipedia, and users there pretend to have no affiliation with Wikipedia while on the wiki.)
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