Uncyclopedia, "the Content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,"Main Page] is a satirical parody of Wikipedia, though Uncyclopedia Wikipedia - that Wikipedia is a parody of Uncyclopedia. The site was launched in January 2005 by Jonathan Huang and an unnamed counterpart (known to Uncyclopedia internals as 'Stillwaters' or 'Euniana'), and claims to be a project of the "Uncyclomedia Foundation", a fictitious parody of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The self-proclaimed mission of Uncyclopedia is to provide a SPOV, or Satirical Point of View in the wiki format. However, it frequently deviates from this goal, and produces "humorous" articles on all topics, most of which are not necessarily satire. Humour of all possible categories enters the wiki, prompting an equally freeflowing response; for example, the originally-Vandalism classification of articles.

Despite the open nature of Uncyclopedia, in which some 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 specifically promote agendas such as spreading antisemitism, misogyny, racism, anti- or pro Christian bigotry, and homophobia beyond the intentions of tasteful parody. Although the site's editorial policies tend to be quite forgiving, Uncyclopedia's administrators work diligently to maintain the site's standards through banning vandals and disruptive users and removing articles that appear to have "no redeeming value", much like Wikipedia.

History

Uncyclopedia was launched in the January of 2005 by 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 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.. ^* 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 18,000 articles, making it the third largest Wikia-hosted wiki.

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 Making_up_Oscar_Wilde_quotes as well as an Undictionary, an "ick!tionary" of one-liners and "daffynitions" covering a wide variety of topics, and UnNews, 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."Steve Ballmer] 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) "People's_Republic_of_China"

Common themes

• Recurring references about Chuck Norris, saying he kills people and he is the overlord of Nova Scotia.
• Recurring jokes about Kitten_Huffing, an "alternative to street drugs" (it spawned a tradition of using the word "huff" as a synonym of "delete" in relation to articles). See also: Chicken Huffing
• Self-reference (see the Category:Self-reference). For example:
  • The article on Nihilism is blank.
  • The Plagiarism article is filled with "plagiarism".
  • The articles on the Binary, Morse_code, Braille, ROT13, Igpay_Atinlay, Newspeak and Old_English are all written in the encodings and languages that are their subjects.
  • The Recursion redirects to itself.
  • The article on Redundancy is extremely redundant.
  • The article on Brevity has only three words in it (one is texted in white).
  • The article about Sdrawkcab (or sdrawkcaB) is written and formated backwards.
  • The article on Alliteration is composed entirely with words starting with the letter "a".
  • The article on Legalese is written in a parody of legal writing.
  • The article on Hyperlink is entirely covered in hyperlinks.
  • The article about SPAM is filled with SPAM.
  • The article on Stub is a stub.
  • The article on Distraction has trouble staying on top of the subject.
  • The article on Ümläüẗ has every letter that can have an umlaut, with umlauts.
  • The article on Sexual_innuendo is written entirely in sexual innuendo.
  • The article on Tetris is written with Я's and я's in place of R's and r's.
  • The article on Writer's_Block is reserved for editing, and has been for some time.
  • The article on Red_links is filled with red links.
  • The article on French accent emulates a french accent as if the words were transcribed in english spellings.

• Self-contradiction, such as:
  • the page on proper Wiki formatting which is full of formatting errors.
  • The article freedom of expression is heavily censored.
• Pages that are just plain silly and absurd in an unusual way, such as AAAAAAAAA! which could best be described as a nonsensical exercise in Wiki-formatting.
• Identifying laws of science and mathematics as pseudoscience (for example, claiming that air is a fictional substance, although the article can be seen as a parody of the aether theory), while giving credibility to unscientific beliefs.
• Treating harmless animals and inanimate objects as "ferocious beasts", such as rabbits and wardrobes.
• Creating new theorems based on non-mathematical entities, such as the Quaid Disaster Theorem.
• Stating the events of a fictional work or idea as fact.
• Or, stating true facts in a parodic or satirical way, such as in World War I (video game) or J.D. Salinger.
• 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 making Euthanasia a country (or rather, a city-state)
• Turning one individual historical personality into multiple people, for instance, several dozens of incarnations of Jesus (the "Jesii corps") ranging from Original Jesus to Baby Jesus to Ultra Jesus to serve the marketing strategy of the Church. Adolf Hitler is another historical person often duplicated.
• Fictitious "Worst 100" lists that rarely (if ever) contain exactly 100 things. These include made up movies, children's books, television shows, Mozilla Firefox extensions, etc.
• Fake Oscar Wilde quotes, including an entire page about them.
• Avoiding disambiguation, blending together different meanings of a word (one example being when the word the was made the featured article), or creating nonsensical disambiguation pages with completely unrelated links, including a self-referential page (disambiguation).
• Humourous (and often exceedingly long) category names - such as Musicians Who Suck So Monumentally That It Really, Truly Amazes Me That The Earth And Any Surrounding Planets And Quite Possibly A Good Bit Of The Afterlife Have Not Yet Been Swallowed Entirely
• Uncyclopedia's Zork project, a parody on the old Zork games which, like the original Zork Trilogy, consists of three parts or versions: Zork, Zork II and Zork III. It is almost impossible to win these games, as most branches lead to either an infinite loop or the player's death (almost always being eaten by a grue). It spawned a series of jokes about people and articles being eaten by grues. There are also many similar/spinoff games, such as Zork Abridged, Game (which parodies Choose Your Own Adventure-style books), Abyss, a parody of Zork, and Game Online
• Russian reversal, a special way of speaking derived from Yakov Smirnoff's "In Soviet Russia" jokes.
• Creating fictional and often absurd "landmark decisions" made by the Supreme Court, such as "Raccoon Tail vs. Super Mario Cape", "Ketchup vs. Catsup" or "Pot vs. Kettle", or nonsensical cases such as God V. Nietzsche, which is nothing more than a name-calling match.
• Using "Newspeak" from George Orwell's famous text 1984 to place value on or rate certain pages.
• Uncyclopedia's own guideline page, How to be funny and not just stupid, is parodied as How to be stupid and not just funny.

MediaWiki

• Wikimedia Foundation = Uncyclomedia Foundation
• Wikinews = UnNews
• Wikiquote = QuoteUnquote
• Wiktionary = Undictionary
• WikiBooks = UnBooks
• Meta-Wiki = UnMeta

This site includes many templates that parody the wording or appearance of Wikipedia templates, including:

• The random stub template:

This article is a Stub. The article submitter may also have been smoking crack. You can help Uncyclopedia by expanding it.

This article is a Perfect stub article. You can Find or fix a stub Wikipedia by expanding it.

• The Wrongtitle:

The title given to this article is displayed incorrectly because computers are trying to take over the Earth, so pretend it says Correct title.

The correct title of this article is Correct title. It appears incorrectly here due to technical restrictions.