Uncyclopedia


 * Not to be confused with Uncyclopedia.de, Unciklopédia or Unsaiklopedia.

Uncyclopedia (or Uncyclopædia), "the content-free encyclopedia that anyone can edit," is a  of Wikipedia, though Uncyclopedia claims the reverse (and correctly claims that Wikipedia claims the reverse, and vice versa, ad infinitum . . . ).

The goal of this project is to provide misinformation in a and  way. Entries tended to be short and  in its infancy. The current partially successful trend at Uncyclopedia is to make all entries very developed and polished. This includes pictures, and even sound bites. Random humor is also on the wane, with preferred articles containing a novel or subtle blurring of the truth.

(As of: 2012-12-03, before the fork)

Independent fork
(As of: 2013-07-26)

In January 2013, the majority of the Uncyclopedia community and moved it to independent hosting. Wikia and a few users that stayed behind continue to maintain their version of the site at its own URL as a direct competitor.

The community at Absurdopedia, the Russian-language Uncyclopedia, also moved from Wikia in October 2010.

Wikia
(As of: 2013-07-26)

As of February 2013, the Wikia-hosted Uncyclopedia contained over 29,000 articles, making it the third largest Wikia wiki.

Uncyclopedia was transferred to Wikia on 26 May 2005; Uncyclopedia co-founder Jonathan Huang (Chronarion) sold the uncyclopedia.org domain out from under the project to Wikia in a 2006 backroom deal and Wikia moved the content to uncyclopedia.wikia.com over the objections of the community on 23 October 2008. Further problems occurred in 2012, as Wikia censored images and placed disclaimers on the site; these were major factors in the decision of the majority of users to leave and establish an independently-hosted site in 2013. The issues continued long after the split, with Wikia taking away Uncyclopedia's independent userlist (to replace it with a unified login scheme) and censoring content in various manners.

The wiki, however, did not use the standard, ad-heavy Oasis skin until 2018 as it needs to look like Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia parody. This reskin caused many additional Uncyclopedia-related projects (such as Nonciclopedia and Nonsensopedia) to fork in 2018 and caused click-bait image links to be auto-generated and displayed for many inapproprate titles, such as "masturbation", "blow job" or "child porn". These intrusive links only worsened the conflicts with Wikia over content, which ended with Wikia/Fandom forcing the entire Uncyclopedia project off its servers in March 2019, eventually leaving not a permanent explanation of what happened to the project (or where the content could be found off-Wikia) but merely "This wiki is closed", breaking hundreds of thousands of inbound links. The content was salvaged and is now on uncyclopedia.ca

Because of the non-commercial licence, Wikia has long claimed the English-language Uncyclopedia to not have ads. Nonetheless, a long and controversial history of Wikia placing intrusive house ads (introduced in 2006 as "Wikia Spotlight") exists to promote other Wikia sites which are heavily laden with commercial display advertising.

Uncyclopedia blocking policy
One of Wikipedia's stated policies is "assume good faith"; Uncyclopedia parodies this as "assume bad faith" - although it's difficult to tell at times whether this is in jest or actively taken to heart by administrators.

A wide range of offences can lead to a block, frequently with a humiliating reason given. Administrator, Mordillo stated that their policy is, "We have the 'piss off the admins and they ban you rule'". It's sometimes hard to tell when Uncyclopedians are serious and when they are joking. They used to block users (as recently as April-May 2008) with the comment, "Your penis is too small." or "Your penis is too small. Come back when you reach puberty."  It's impossible to tell if blocks are reasonable as the content that leads to a block is frequently deleted. They also have a funny and humiliating ban message.