Uncyclopedia

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 Huang and an unnamed counterpart.[2] The Uncyclopedia logo is a hollow potato named Sophia, a parody of Wikipedia's globe logo.[2]

Uncyclopedia was founded in January 2005, and quickly outgrew its original webhost. 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.[3] Huang transferred ownership of the uncyclopedia.org domain to Wikia, Inc. on July 10, 2006.[4]

Uncyclopedia's content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 license[5]. 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).[6]

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.[7]

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