Talk:Uncyclopedia

CSS workarounds and bias

Spike, I hope you don't mind I corrected your addition. Maybe you were referring to PseudoMonobook as well, but that was written by a Wikia person. It might also be worth mentioning that the site CSS has been modified to more closely resemble Wikipedia/Vector. [1] I know you took issue with my involvement with this article, and I was considerably less than helpful, so I won't touch it further (I did fix some dead links, though).

I notice the non-Wikia-specific Uncyclopedia references have all been changed to uncyclopedia.co, which also comes first in the infobox, and .co references are just "Uncyclopedia" whereas .wikia.com references are "Uncyclopedia (Wikia)". This seems strange and biased. uncyclopedia.wikia.com is the original and is more active with a higher search engine ranking (site statistics, search results -- note that DuckDuckGo has only en.uncyclopedia.co in the Wikipedia box, probably due to the article placing it first). It seems particularly odd to only cite .co for the article count, as if the other site doesn't exist; surely they should both be used there. Also, the secondary sources cited only mention the Wikia site, even the ones published after 2013. For the sake of argument I looked for mentions of .co and found these: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] All but the first are trivial, and one of them also mentions uncyclopedia.wikia.com. Wikis have been declining in popularity since about 2007, so I believe you will have a hard time finding post-2013 coverage of either site. I would appreciate it if someone uninvolved with the topic would consider this issue as well as the fact that the infobox contains a logo only found on the fork and the Wikidata page has the same image and lists en.uncyclopedia.co as the "official website". Furthermore, the infobox contains interwiki links to .co, which circumvent the normal nofollowing of external links, while it has only normal external links to the other site. ♫ekips39 (talk)❀ 22:40, 14 July 2018 (UTC)

Uncyclopedia/Wikia closing soon

Uncyclopedia.wikia is due to close sometime after March 31st, 2019. Read the links for more details.

It would be best to start changing any links from uncyclopedia.wikia to uncyclopedia.co.

Sources:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190301165358/http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom#

https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:Hosting_options_for_Uncyclopedia_(wikia)?useskin=oasis — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.59.96.110 (talk) 00:37, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

The content that was on Uncyclopedia Wikia has moved to http://uncyclopedia.ca. This page should have two links. All the references to Greggs was from this version, not the one at uncyclopedia.co --Gepid (talk) 08:49, 16 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm more lost than the Donner Party, but what's up with the page counts? This article's lede says that Desciclopédia's little sibling has about 30000 pages, but uncyclopedia.ca is reporting 32000 - which is correct? I also see that an anon-IP just tried to add this:

"The former Wikia-based community had voted prior to the Wikia site's closure to rejoin the broader Uncyclomedia community that was set up in 2013, thus leaving only one English Uncyclopedia.{Cite web|archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20190325094026/uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:Uncyclomedia%7Carchive-date=March 25, 2019|title=Uncyclomedia|quote=By a two vote majority, Uncyclopedia.wikia will now be hosted by Uncyclomedia. The vote conducted over the past week is now closed.|publisher=Uncyclopedia (Wikia)|accessdate=March 25, 2019|dead-url=no|df=mdy-all}"

Is this true? My understanding, upon looking at both projects, was that uncyclopedia.co was proposing to host the two as separate, independent wikis. That's not the same as "leaving only one English Uncyclopedia". In any case, it looks like they never opened that new project for editing? Facts, please? Q788771 (talk) 15:47, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

The original plan was to move uncyclopedia.wikia to a website address that was separate from the uncyclopedia.co. A back-up was made at uncyclopedia.ca but this has now become the active one as the earlier website was incomplete before the closure of the wikia hosted site. The two Uncyclopedias were to stay independent in both situations. --Gepid (talk) 18:06, 23 May 2019 (UTC)

The situation is confusing. Gepid is partially correct, but not forthright. The original plan was to maintain a separate wiki on the same server as Uncyclopedia.co. That changed when the users of the Uncyclopedia Wikia ultimately chose to move to Uncyclopedia.co after several stages of voting, and it's where the whole of Uncyclopedia Wikia seems to reside now. Uncyclopedia.co posted an announcement today that includes some of the archives from Wikia where this move was decided.

Though all of the Uncyclopedia Wikia administrators were carried over to the existing Uncyclopedia.co wiki, a couple of them also chose to fork an older version at Uncyclopedia.ca as an apparent back-up of the main website, and this is being used as a launchpad for a totally new wiki under the same name. It gets especially confusing when you take into consideration the extra 2,000 articles present on this new wiki created only last week, but upon closer inspection, most of these are either spam pages or poor quality articles filtered out of the main site over the years and reinstated in this back-up for some reason. The creation of this back-up was not something the Uncyclopedia Wikia community was ever involved in, and they actively fought against it during the penultimate and final votes to no avail. Due to apparent link-spamming and botting to promote the site, Wikia/Fandom have had to disavow and globally ban those involved with its creation and the domain has been blacklisted and scrubbed site-wide, though Gepid seems to be excluded from this. The founders remain administrators on the main site, but I can't find any information that indicates the back-up is any more notable than the dozens of other Uncyclopedia forks created by former users, e.g. "Uncyclopedia 2.0", and the main site makes no reference to its existence. I can't even find any references to it in archives from the closed Wikia site, as it was created after the userbase had apparently moved to Uncyclopedia.co and no further votes to move elsewhere exist, as far as I can tell. Cwtch Hiraeth (talk) 02:26, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

I just checked the archive and your story doesn't check out; the 2000 pagecount discrepancy existed before Wikia set out to destroy Uncyclopedia. What's on uncyclopedia.ca isn't a "totally new wiki" as those pages existed all along. No idea why they're missing from the fork. Q788771 (talk) 03:50, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

There was a "Forest Fire Week" quality cleanup immediately after the wiki moved in 2013, which resulted in what appears to be hundreds of spam pages and a similar number of poorly written articles being purged from the main site. An even smaller purge was carried out two months ago, and further deletions have followed the Uncyclopedia Fandom vote and seem to happen pretty frequently in general. The discrepancy - actually 1,500 pages, from the looks - is a result of Uncyclopedia Fandom's inactivity. Spam piled up, but the founder of the backup wiki seems to be deleting some of it now. Cwtch Hiraeth (talk) 06:05, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Uncyclopedia.wikia was never a 'mirror website' of uncyclopedia.co. In fact Uncyclopedia.wikia was denied to be an uncyclopedia at all by uncyclopedia.co between 2013-2019. Content between the two sites was only shared by a writer contributing to both sites. My point is that this article should report accurately what has happened. Uncyclopedia.wikia doesn't exist except as a dead link on Fandom. There are currently two live websites (a third one at Miraheze looks abandoned now) with the Uncyclopedia name. This article should reflect that. --Gepid (talk) 13:31, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

In any case, it looks like it's actual content (and not just spam or vandalism) which is missing, for instance [9], [10], [11] actually do return three different results. Q788771 (talk) 16:38, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

All references to the fork have been deleted from this article. Forks and mirrors are not notable enough to warrant coverage. BFDIBebble (talk) 20:21, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Lesen Wikipedia:Neutral point of view first. This is a biased opinion. 21:27, 24 May 2019 Kevindongyt

Are you trying to apply the Uncyclopedia:Neutered point of view policy to the article page, or to this talk page? It only applies to articles. Q788771 (talk) 21:32, 24 May 2019 (UTC)

Article page, but also some of the opinions here. Since I made an edit trying to be neutral and linking .co AND .ca without causing a flame war, a flame war happened.

That was good to try and be neutral but as is evident on this article, one side - uncyclopedia.co - is keen to delete all references to the continued existence of uncyclopedia.ca.--Gepid (talk) 19:16, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

True, but if four of the five Kevindongyt posts conveniently list en.uncyclopedia.co while removing uncyclopedia.ca, how is that "trying to be neutral"? That looks to be an endorsement of one of the multiple sides (and there are at least three - as some are here to promote Miraheze or just to troll for the sake of doing so). The article needs to remove just plain wrong or outdated info (the discussion of Wikia and workarounds to "fix" individual skins they broke should scale back now that Wikia has nothing to do with Uncyclopedia™), replace any cybersquatted domains or broken URL's, acknowledge both sides and explain (with citations of reliable sauces) why on earth there are two of the same project in various languages, including Russian and American. Q788771 (talk) 15:32, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

The new math?

" In 2007, 25% (or 20 out of 34) of the Uncyclopedia collection was hosted by Wikia..."

Wait a minute... that doesn't add up? Q788771 (talk) 05:19, 25 May 2019 (UTC)

Protection

Please remove the protection to this page and recognize Uncyclopedia.ca as the one and only Uncyclopedia. This is unbelievably cruel. Doogletooth (talk) 10:17, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Just in case anyone was going to reply to this, the user has been permabanned by Wikipedia. --Gepid (talk) 11:49, 26 May 2019 (UTC)

Some context why this has become such a battleground

Hi, I'm Isarra. I host uncyclopedia.co (along with a team of other volunteers). I write code, and reports, and vaguely informative newsletters. Sometimes, when things get entirely too out of hand, I write up explanations of just what the crap is going on. What's going on here is an overflow of the following tale of fancy and woe:

It all started in 2013, when a large subset of Uncyclopedia's users decided to move the wiki off of Wikia, becoming uncyclopedia.co. This only sort of worked, as a few users remained behind, unhappy in particular with how the move decision was handled (privately over IRC, email, etc as we were afraid wikia would try to stop us if we held a public discussion).

Fast forward to 2019, Wikia/Fandom decided to close the various language uncyclopedias it still hosted, including the english uncyclopedia.wikia wiki, which still supported its own small community. By this point, tensions between the two communities had if anything gotten worse, for instance due to mutual incivility, disputes that were resolved not to certain users' liking, or even simply due to users being banned from one project and going to the other, which has happened a few times in either direction. But discussions about where to go in order to not lose the project and everything that had been added in the past six years proceeded, culminating in a vote with a two-way tie between moving to a separate wiki on the same server as uncyclopedia.co and being hosted by miraheze. Another option, a specific user from their own community hosting it, was also considered but ultimately rejected, as it received no votes at close.

In the end, one of the admins placed his vote as a tiebreaker and closed it: that the uncyclopedia.wikia site would move to a separate site on the same hosting as uncyclopedia.co, and we (the uncyclopedia.co sysadmins) started working with him as our point of contact to actually make it happen.

In the meantime, the uncyclopedia.co admins found a sockpuppet across both wikis who had apparently manipulated the vote, but nothing was really discussed onwiki about how to address this, so the .co sysadmins simply proceeded as planned. Not long after, having mostly set up the new wiki, we asked for feedback before finalising it. We got no response.

Having already put a couple of weeks into this, the sysadmins basically just buggered off at this point because until these folks could be bothered to get back to us and commit to editing it, there wasn't really any point finishing the rebuild or opening it for editing.

A month went by. I got back to working on my grant projects. Our other main sysadmin went missing entirely. Most of the rest of the uncyclopedia.wikia community just gave up on the entire thing and started manually importing their articles to uncyclopedia.co and started editing there. Apparnetly some of the admins on uncyclopedia.wikia had been stalling Wikia to put off the closing because the new wiki isn't ready, citing various issues they'd never actually reported to me (and when I found out later and followed up and specifically asked them about these issues, they wouldn't provide any further information either).

Then the same admin who'd placed his vote at the last minute and closed the thing, who'd been our point of contact all the way through and stopped responding to us, announces that now they're moving uncyclopedia.ca instead (the specific user vote option). Everyone come! Etc.

It looks like three-four admins were involved in this, who completely disregarded the onwiki vote (there was no subsequent vote/discussion anywhere public), and possibly even flat-out misled me and my team into putting considerable work into setting up an entire new site, and never, at any point, told us that anything had changed, that they didn't want it, or there were other plans. And that's uncyclopedia.ca. It could perhaps be notable for the fraud involved, if someone wanted to press the matter or write all that up somewhere, but given how much frustration and wasted time has already gone into this, it looks like the uncyclopedia.co community/admins have largely decided to just ignore it and focus on better supporting the more meaningful community that joined them in the meantime. And I'd rather just write code.

Anyway, that's where things stand. Probably best to keep anyone from either site from editing this or any related articles directly, just for what a mess it is. -— Isarra ༆ 08:59, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

And if anyone wants to add links to this, go ahead; I just don't care enough and am sort of hoping my considerable leverage as an established troll will give it enough weight that... uh, who cares. Please everyone just follow policy and crap. None of this should even be relevant here to begin with. -— Isarra ༆ 09:03, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Unfortunately, one of your users (Supergeeky1) is following me everywhere and, if an article has links to both .co and .ca, is removing everything but .co while leaving comments like "ENglish Uncyclopedia has been at .co since 2013. All others are unofficial." I see you acknowledge a timeline "culminating in a vote with a two-way tie between moving to a separate wiki on the same server as uncyclopedia.co and being hosted by miraheze"? That would infer the claim (which was edit-warred into this article repeatedly) that there was a vote to merge the two projects is, indeed, fictional? Thanks. I suppose that still leaves the question why, if you wanted to move the original community to un.uncyclopedia.co, was that project never opened for login or editing?

I can't say that preventing "anyone from either site from editing this or any related articles directly" is a solution. There are trolls who don't belong to either of the two English-language Uncyclopedias who are still causing disruption, including posts impersonating other users. That's been going on since Wikia's announcement three months ago. It's not just Miraheze, it's disruption solely for its own sake. Removing everyone involved is also going to leave some very outdated info (like "Uncyclopedia is hosted by Wikia") still present in some very obscure and remote corners of Wikimedia because at some point nobody cares that Wikipédia's article on Desciclopédia was linking a cybersquatted porn URL instead of the Romanian Uncyclopedia... except maybe some insiders.

At this point, even something as obviously nonsensical as "As of 2007, 25% (20 of 34) of the Uncyclopedias are hosted by Wikia" can't be removed from this article without someone edit-warring the erroneous info back in. If something here is just plain factually wrong, it should be removed. After all, Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia. The nonsense belongs elsewhere.Q788771 (talk) 13:35, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Hi Q788771,

I have no problem discussing this with you, but I hope you can calm down so this issue can be discussed civilly.

In regards to your edits, I'd first like to state that I initially assumed these edits were performed by an uninformed spectator, given your username, but I've since been told that you are apparently Carlb. If this is the case, then I apologize for misjudging your edits.

A user dropped into the Uncyclopedia Discord server several days ago and informed us that a recently registered account was making sweeping edits around the Wikimedia Foundation (here on Wikipedia, and many other foreign projects - somewhere in the area of 30 to 40 different languages) and many other wiki sites (TV Tropes and RationalWiki, to name a couple) with the sole intention of replacing Uncyclopedia links. You had replaced virtually every link and reference to the English Uncyclopedia project hosted at Uncyclopedia.co since 2013 with Uncyclopedia.ca, a fork claiming to be the successor of the closed Wikia site, registered roughly two weeks ago, sporting a domain seemingly chosen to mimic the former site. Additionally, many foreign Uncyclopedia links were redirected to wikis that you personally host. I'm unfortunately not bilingual, so I remain pretty much completely in the dark regarding the post-Wikia situation surrounding these foreign Uncyclopedia projects, but I have no reason to doubt that your hosting is genuine. However, no indication why this new .ca fork should take precedence over the long-standing .co site was given, and I reverted the English links back yesterday. If you feel Uncyclopedia.ca is worthy of inclusion, then you're welcome to add these links back along with references for notability. I see you've actually started to completely replace the links once again without any such references, but there's an obvious COI here and to avoid edit warring, I won't be reverting your edits.

Back on topic, what Isarra stated is factually correct. Whether or not you personally want to call it a "merge", several votes were held to settle on the future location of the Wikia site. One such vote was specifically held early on to merge with Uncyclopedia.co, as seen here (this revision is the only archive), but this was prematurely halted. The consensus of the final vote called for a move to Uncyclomedia, which was accepted and announced on Wikia immediately after. With the Wikia copy closed, that leaves Uncyclopedia.co, now made up of everyone who voted to leave Wikia in 2013 and the remaining users who moved in 2019, per Isarra's timeline above.

The English Uncyclopedia alone has been forked many times over (including Uninspired, two separate Uncyclopedia 2 wikis 12, and your very own personal Uncyclopedia Mirror), but to my knowledge, none of these have the history or notability like Uncyclopedia.co has. Most are created in a matter of minutes to hours using database dumps freely provided to literally anyone who wants them on the former Wikia home page, and this recent Uncyclopedia.ca fork doesn't seem to be any exception. Its creation was never voted for or announced anywhere on the Wikia site prior to the move, and the entire Wikia community including all of its administrators have since transferred over to Uncyclopedia.co. All of this is outlined in Uncyclopedia.co's press release, which I'm sure you've read. Comments made above indicate that Wikia has even blacklisted all Uncyclopedia.ca links, but I don't know enough about the situation to speculate why.

I doubt that you'll find anyone from the original Uncyclopedia.co or any of the recent migrants from Wikia who fundamentally objects to the inclusion of your Uncyclopedia.ca fork (or "backup site" - whatever you want to call it) and its history in this article or any others, but there should ideally be some indication for 1) how Uncyclopedia.ca was suddenly chosen as the successor of the Wikia site despite all votes and archives stating otherwise, and 2) why it's any more notable than the other forks. Apart from reverting your foreign edits that I initially felt were destructive and generally inaccurate, the Uncyclopedia.co administration hasn't touched any of these articles since the creation of your fork. I have, however, seen three separate administrators from Uncyclopedia.ca (you, Gepid, and Ekips39) engaging in edit wars and inserting uncredible information, and I hope going forward that you and the other creators show the same restraint that we have until these issues are addressed and some form of neutrality is reached. I wholeheartedly agree that this article and presumably many others are in need of an update, but such edits are evidently impossible for the time being. I sincerely hope that we can all work together peacefully in the future. Supergeeky1 (talk) 18:49, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Not to get involved with this discussion or anything, but how can Q788771 add his preferred edits back to the page if it's still under full protection? Just askin'.Neateditor123 (talk) 21:22, 27 May 2019 (UTC)Neateditor123

Where has uncyclopedia.co gained notability? The last independent issue of notability that Uncyclopedia received (i.e. a story reported outside Uncyclopedia) was for the Greggs article on the uncyclopedia.wikia.org site. --Gepid (talk) 23:42, 27 May 2019 (UTC)

Would you mind pointing out where I "[engaged] in edit wars and [inserted] uncredible information"? I believe my only recent edit to this article was this, a revert of obvious vandalism. ♫9cfilorux (talk)❀ 04:07, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

What next

Neither uncyclopedia.co nor uncyclopedia.ca is notable in its own right, as neither has been covered in reliable independent sources. There may be a case for not mentioning either of these in the article, but if they must be included, I believe .ca has a stronger claim because it is a direct continuation of the original, notable Wikia wiki and .co ceased to be such in 2013. What there is clearly not a case for is only including .co.

The existence of .ca as a continuation is supported on .ca itself on these pages, as well as this archived page from uncyclopedia.wikia.com. (It appears the mentions of .ca in the article were completely unsourced. One or more of these should be used as references if it is added back.) WP:SPS says that self-published sources such as these may be used as sources on themselves; this would be an instance of that. .co as a fork is sourced with a link to uncyclopedia.wikia.com (now dead but can be found here). If the inclusion of that is considered acceptable, .ca should probably be by the same criteria -- unless there are other sources with contrary viewpoints that are considered to take precedence.

The contrary view being advocated is that uncyclopedia.wikia.com was closed down entirely or merged with uncyclopedia.co. The sources others have put forward for that are this page and this page. Are they usable?

• The first source states "By a two vote majority, Uncyclopedia.wikia will now be hosted by Uncyclomedia. The vote conducted over the past week is now closed." The meaning of this is that Wikia Uncyclopedia would remain a separate site but be hosted by "Uncyclomedia" (here referring to the team hosting .co). It does not mean that Wikia Uncyclopedia would merge with .co. "Uncyclomedia" is also ambiguous, as it has been used to refer to another unrelated Uncyclopedia host. Interpreting this source as stating that uncyclopedia.wikia.com merged with uncyclopedia.co is at best original research and at worst misrepresentation.
• The second source states clearly and unambiguously that uncyclopedia.wikia.com merged with uncyclopedia.co. It is a page on .co, thus no more (or less) reliable than the pages on .ca, and less directly connected to the article subject than pages on uncyclopedia.wikia.com. A compromise could be presenting this view alongside the one that .ca exists as a continuation. However, the .co page is not covered by use of self-published sources as sources on themselves, because it is being used to support a claim about a third party. uncyclopedia.wikia.com and uncyclopedia.co may both be "Uncyclopedia" but have historically been separate communities. uncyclopedia.co also does not meet the criteria listed for reliable sources in WP:USESPS#Self-published doesn't mean a source is automatically invalid except for "It is "appropriate for the material in question", i.e., the source is directly about the subject, rather than mentioning something unrelated in passing."

There was discussion of whether .ca has more articles than .co. I believe this issue does not belong in the article. The claim was sourced to .ca's statistics page, meaning that it comes from a comparison between the numbers in the .ca and .co statistics; this is original research. The article should say only that uncyclopedia.wikia.com moved to uncyclopedia.ca.

I have not seen any policy-based arguments here for including .co and excluding .ca. I have seen opinions about which is "official", which is an undefined characteristic that has no bearing on what is important to Wikipedia -- notability and verifiability. I have also seen claims about internal events that are original research or unsourced and stray into WP:NOTFORUM territory. In the absence of contrary policy-based arguments, I recommend giving the original Wikia site the most prominence in the article, followed by (in that order) uncyclopedia.ca and uncyclopedia.co, the latter both having passing mentions only and being used sparingly in references and links. I noted above in July 2018 that .co was already being given undue weight, and the situation is even worse now. ♫9cfilorux (talk)❀ 04:05, 28 May 2019 (UTC)