User:Chaser/Uncyclopedia
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[edit] Themes
left|thumb|100px|The main page of Uncyclopedia reskinned in regards to Italy's FIFA World Cup victory
- 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. For example, the article on nihilism is blank, the articles on the binary system, Morse code, Braille, Leetspeak and ROT13 are all written in the encodings that are their subjects, the page on 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 backwards (or sdrawkcaB) is written and formatted backwards, the article on alliteration is composed entirely with words starting with the letter "a", the article on hyperlink is entirely covered in hyperlinks, the vandalism page is highly "vandalised", the article about spam is filled with SPAM, the article about the iPod has all the words starting with i capitalised on the second letter, like iS, the article on the Nintendo Wii has all of the 'i's in the article replaces with 'ii's, the article on KDE has plenty of K's, and writer's block seems to struggle with finding an original joke. In addition, the page on William Shatner is written with commas between almost every word, parodying the way Shatner spoke on Star Trek.
- Self-contradiction, such as the page on proper Wiki formatting which is full of formatting errors.
- 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. 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 (disambiguation).
- Humorous (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 paradory of Zork, and Uncyclopedia:Game: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".
- Using "Newspeak" from George Orwell's famous text 1984 to place value on or rate certain pages.
- Uncyclopedia has a satirical set of analogs of the Wikimedia Foundation; where Wiktionary is parodied as Undictionary; Wikinews is parodied as UnNews; and the Wikimedia Foundation is parodied as the Uncyclomedia Foundation.
- The infamous Willy on Wheels from Wikipedia is conoted with Wheely Willy in the same article albeit both are unrelated.
[edit] Main Page holidays
Image:Uncyclopedia Oscar Wilde.png |thumb|right|260px|Screenshot of Uncyclopedia showing the site re-skinned to celebrate Oscar Wilde's birthday.
There is now a tradition of celebrating various anniversaries (some fictional) with a Google-like reskinning of Uncyclopedia's Main Page. Examples have included:
- April 1, 2005: WikiTestament - for April Fools' Day the Uncyclopedia page was given an evangelistic skinning.
- July 4, 2005: A "simple" version of Uncyclopedia - for Americans, featuring various (gentle) insults (including intentionally bad spelling).
- July 30, 2005: International Page Blanking Day - where most of the main page was blanked, as an homage to the vandal technique of blanking pages. (Note: This archived version only has the opening text changed. None of the page is blanked.)
- August 1, 2005: Swiss National Independence Day - the front page was edited to have a distinctly Neutral/Financial theme.
- August 31, 2005: Blogese Main Page - for International Blog Day, the main page parodied many of the perceived elements of blogs.
- September 12, 2005: Uncyclopedia Plus! - 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!"
- September 19, 2005: Pirateopedia - 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.
- October 16, 2005: House of Pomegranates - logo is changed to "The House of Pomegranates" (showing Oscar Wilde) and site is re-designed to use his writing style to celebrate the birthday of its supposed "founder".
- November 22, 2005: Trekkiepedia/Uncyclo Alpha - logo and main page reskinned to spoof Memory Alpha on their birthday.
- December 3, 2005: AAAAAAAAA!-day - everything on the front page is expressed with the letter A.
- December 25, 2005: North Korea - 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.
- January 5, 2006: Uncyclopedia's First Birthday - The main page and logo are reskinned in "retro" (one year old) style to celebrate the anniversary of the site's founding.
- January 24, 2006: Plain Text Day - The main page is reskinned to give the impression it is rendered using a text mode browser.
- January 28, 2006: Victory in Euroipods Day - 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.
- February 5, 2006: Uncyclopedia, Superb Owl Sunday edition! A tribute to the Super Bowl, with multiple references to Peyton Manning
- February 13, 2006: Turtleopedia, an unplanned minor reskin making fun of the latency issues Wikipedia experienced on that day.
- February 14, 2006: Emopedia, 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 proposed new main page, despite Wikipedia not yet having made that the official main page. After Wikipedia made the switch, the administrators jokingly accused them of having copied Uncyclopedia's main page design.
- March 4, 2006: Ewokpedia, the "IE-free Edit Wars encyclopedia" - a tribute to Star Wars and particularly Wookieepedia's first anniversary. The logo is changed to an image of the unfinished second Death Star(Which actually has the current Wikipedia logo embedded into it.), like the actual Wookieepedia logo.
- March 19, 2006: Return of the AAAAAAAAA! Day - 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.
- March 30, 2006 - March 31, 2006: Uncyclopedia in Mourning - a death theme mourning the departure - not the actual deaths - of two established Uncyclopedians.
- April 1, 2006: iHumor - an Apple site parody, because Apple was founded on the 1st of April.
- April 20, 2006: Hitler's Birthday - the main page was reskinned and the Uncyclopedia Logo is replaced with a picture of Adolf Hitler as a baby. An article on the fictional computer game Holocaust Tycoon was used as the day's featured article.
- April 22, 2006: National Try To Assassinate The President Day - A large image covers the main page saying "This Site Has Been Shut Down by the FBI! You Can Click But You Can't Assassinate the President." Underneath this is a box made to look like a rating from the MPAA film rating system reading "Assassinating the President: Not a very nice thing to do". This is a parody of GameFAQs's April Fools joke for 2006.
- May 15, 2006: Yahoos! - The entirety of the main page is replaced with a spoof of Yahoo's main page.
- June 6, 2006: Satanopedia - The main page is redesigned to look satanic because of the date being 06/06/06.
- July 1, 2006: Baconopedia - The main page is designed to be in favour of Canadians and Bacon in honour of Canada Day.
- July 4, 2006: UScyclopedia - The main page is designed to celebrate Independence Day (screen grab available).
These are generally planned in advance and hidden (as much as is possible on a MediaWiki powered wiki) as a user subpage or in the Babel: namespace.
