Talk:Uncyclopedia/Archive 5

Latest comment: 4 years ago by Zombiebaron in topic Drafting an Rfc
Archive 1Archive 3Archive 4Archive 5Archive 6

Lead section drift

I know virtually none of the people here know how to write a lead section, but even when we get one that's of a good length they seem to have a way of shrinking again shortly after. Take a look at the damn thing, it's four lines! Given the length of the article it should be about 3 paragraphs, but not piddly little one sentence non-paragraphs like that. Richard001 (talk) 00:32, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

I think it is difficult to write a good lead because it is a very specialized article.


Short is a relative term. It all depends on your POV. To a pygmy, this lead probably seems just about perfect. I think a better description of the lead is "scrimpy". It's a much more fun word and, as a bonus, how often are editors gonna be able to use the word "scrimpy". This gives a poor deprived word like "scrimpy" something to do. BTW...."piddly" should be "piddling", I think. But, I'm over 6 feet tall so I'm really not sure.--Buster7 (talk) 21:26, 19 July 2008 (UTC)

Malaysia

The only article used to reference the Government of Malaysia's warning about Uncyclopedia is listed as having been published on January 15, 2008...the problem is the reference section also claims said article was retried on November 16, 2007. Is this some sort of prank? -- Ishikawa Minoru (talk) 15:41, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Probably just an error. The source is from January of this year, and I've changed the access date to reflect that. - TLB (Tick Tock) (Contribs) 10:11, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Uncyclopedia in other languages section

This section has become excessive and is starting to become the largest section, the article should be focused on the site itself not every individual language sister site. There is now 10 in total when only a few need mentioning based on their size but more importantly amount of press coverage.--Otterathome (talk) 03:18, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Neutrality?

This article strikes me as being rather condemning of Uncyclopedia. Although I understand that it is a parody of Wikipedia and therefore some controversy exists, I think there are guidelines about that, and some of its better features could be highlighted more. Voldemort's daughter (talk) 19:01, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

Your input is welcome but without pointing out specific problems in the article editors can only guess which parts you are talking about. I don't agree with your view as the criticism is all well sourced and doesn't swamp the article.--Otterathome (talk) 10:16, 16 July 2008 (UTC)


Wit and Humor

@Otterathome...explain how my edit/addition to the lead is POV.

"From its modest, irreverent beginnings Uncyclopedia has become a cultural bastion of satire and wit." pretty much everything in that statement is not written in a neutral point of view. Modest irrelevant beginnings? 'cultural bastion of satire and wit'? It sounds like an advertisement, plus such a bold statement would require multiple reliable sources.--Otterathome (talk) 22:52, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Do you own a dictionary? Does the subsequent article not discuss how Uncyclopedia came into existence?? Is satire, wit, humor, "funny stuff" not what it is all about?? Your Deletion is more a POV than my edit...Please reinstate--Buster7 (talk) 23:12, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Also, rather than being so quick to delete, you might consider working WITH an other editor. Co-operation may get you what you so desire...becoming an administrator.--Buster7 (talk) 23:15, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
The neutral point of view is neither sympathetic nor in opposition to its subject: it neither endorses nor discourages viewpoints. Debates within topics are clearly described, represented and characterized, but not engaged in. from NPOV, which does not stand for No point of view, by the way!--Buster7 (talk) 23:21, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
Feel free to re-add it when you have some reliable sources..--Otterathome (talk) 23:47, 19 July 2008 (UTC)
I will re-add, but this edit does NOT require any source. The source is the article itself. It is NOT a quote! It is NOT a "tidbit" from some other source! The Lead should reflect, briefly, what the article contains. In a subtle way, it could be considered advertising...but it is NOT! Please do not revert until there is consensus.--Buster7 (talk) 00:07, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Trolling/baiting is not welcome here, I suggest you stop.--Otterathome (talk) 01:11, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

You need to start using tools other than deletion to improve Wikipedia when the problem with an article ISN'T a deletion issue, but a clean-up one. --Buster7 (talk) 04:32, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
If you don't stop trolling, making nonsense edits, and edit warring at Unencyclopedia, you will get blocked. RlevseTalk 09:12, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
RETREAVED FROM Talk:Buster7
I would suggest to check Buster7 contributions and you will see this is not a troll behavior, at all. Best regards, and let's learn from our own mistakes, Miguel.mateo (talk) 08:05, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

RfC: Is edit by Buster7 relevant

Is the edit re: Beginings of Uncyclopedia in the lead section relevant to the article? And, are accusations of trolling unwarranted? --Buster7 (talk) 12:21, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

I don't see why a linguistics RfC was used - this is clearly just a matter of policy. As an uninvolved party, I agree with those editors above; your edits contribute nothing but your own opinion. I will also point out that you are in violation of WP:3RR, and would urge you to stop reverting. Ilkali (talk) 13:20, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
@otterathome...Please keep all talk relevent to this article at this location. That way whomever is interested need only visit one site to "follow the chain"..Thank you.--Buster7 (talk) 15:57, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
@Ilkali...the reason I used the linguistics RfC was twofold...1) It seemed to me that what otterathome had a problem with was--- my languaging--ergo:linguistics/language RfC. The policy issue was by otterathome. Since I'm the one that asked for review, it seemed to fit what I wanted reviewed...2)I am not very experienced at RfC's of ANY kind. It seemed to be the best choice at the time. Sorry for bothering you. --Buster7 (talk) 16:05, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

To me, this addition looks like totally non-neutral. I see that it's also unsourced. At most, if it was from a notable source or from Uncyclopedia itself, it could be attributed. The sentence itself is not relevant unless it can be attributed to a notable source. --Enric Naval (talk) 16:19, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Retreived from Talk:Buster7...I'm amazed you've been trolling for so long without being blocked. I admit, you are very good at what you do.--Otterathome (talk) 15:47, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
I will remove the obviously offensive edit myself. Have a nice day, all.--Buster7 (talk) 16:29, 20 July 2008 (UTC) DONE--Buster7 (talk) 16:49, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Retrieved from Talk:Buster7...I'm old enough (and smart enough) to know not to feed trolling by showing up at a troll convention. I edit in good faith. You should attempt the same.--Buster7 (talk) 16:42, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Buster7"

One final point I just realized...Just for Clarity...It was otterathome that violated the THREE-REVERT-RULE. His third revert was at 19:10 on 19JULY2008...2 1/2 hours later I reconstructed the sentence, hoping to appeasse his sensibilities. When that didn't work and the consensus was not in my favor, I conceeded.--Buster7 (talk) 17:31, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Please make sure you understand rules before you accuse others of breaking them. Since Otterathome made only three reverts, he has not violated 3RR. You, however, have ([1], [2], [3], [4]). The fact that you did not revert to exactly the same text each time is immaterial.
"When that didn't work and the consensus was not in my favor, I [...]". Consensus was never in your favor. It took until four editors disagreed with your changes for you to retract them. Please see WP:BRD. Ilkali (talk) 17:43, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
Please understand...I'm new here...I don't mean to offend. I'm just trying to understand the rules so I dont keep breaking them. So.....the three revert rule is only violated with the FOURTH revert by the SAME editor. Is that what your saying? WP: BRD is not that clear on the subject, at least not to me. I'm really sorry that I got this hornets nest going. There was a tag that said the article Lead was too short. I was just doing my best...no need to make me cry!--Buster7 (talk) 01:35, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
You were just getting stuck at the R, reverting the sentence back instead of going to the D and arguing solid arguments on the talk page, and making serious alterations to the sentence to address the issues raised on the talk page by other editors before going back to the B again. I suggest that you read Alastair's comment below, since he gives good advice (althought a bit too sarcastic for my liking!). --Enric Naval (talk) 03:42, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Don't take Ilkali too seriously Buster, he's a notorious edit warrer awaiting discipline when I choose to pursue it.
It's useful to see more evidence of his unhelpful inflaming rather than settling of disputes.
Regarding your sentence, Buster, "From its modest, irreverent beginnings Uncyclopedia has become a cultural bastion of satire and wit."
That's a perfectly verifiable statement. It makes five claims of fact and/or opinion, all of which can be sourced.
  1. Uncyc had a modest beginning (most things do)
  2. Uncyc had an irreverent beginning (this is the point of satire)
  3. Uncyc has become a cultural bastion (this really does need a source)
  4. Uncyc is a bastion of satire (obvious by logo alone)
  5. Uncyc is a bastion of wit (true, but humour is in the eye of the beholder, there are two POVs—those who get the joke and those who don't)
As for whether the sentence is relevant, opinions and facts regarding Uncyc are obviously relevant in an article on Uncyc.
Two recommendations for Buster
  1. return this sentence when you can find a source that uses words to the effect that Uncyc is a "cultural bastion" (easy); and
  2. wait a few weeks to do this—don't feed trolls.
One recommendation for other editors
  1. in cases like this the appropriate method is to let the text stand, discuss it in talk, apply a citation request if needed.
Cheers Alastair Haines (talk) 02:44, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I agree a lot with the points outlined on Alastair's post. I'll add that the part of "being a bastion" was the most problematic part on the sentence. Saying that something is the bastion of anything with no source at all goes so directly against not adding unsourced opinions that it caused the whole sentence to be disregarded (at least on my case, on hindsight, I know that I subconsciously discarded the whole thing when I reached that part). Regretabily, it just made the whole thing look like an attempt to insert a personal joke.
I'll also add that you should either find sources for the statement, or look for reliable sources that describe the history of Uncyclopedia and what it has become, and use their wording. If you are going to add stuff with sources, it should be really obvious stuff that doesn't contain any opinions. --Enric Naval (talk) 03:42, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I debated about the word "bastion" and, looking back, I should have realized it would possibly be misinterpreted as funny or a joke considering the topic of this article and a previously humorous entry I had made. Also, @Enric Naval: your explanation of WP:BRD is very helpful. Thank you and Alastair for your advice.--Buster7 (talk) 04:23, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
"Don't take Ilkali too seriously Buster, he's a notorious edit warrer awaiting discipline when I choose to pursue it". Childishness like this won't help whatever case you eventually make, Alastair. It's hard to imagine anyone making the same comment about you without you labelling it as harassment, slander and ad hominem. Ilkali (talk) 08:27, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
Well done you two! Warm fuzzy all-round. ;) Alastair Haines (talk) 04:52, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I am carefully looking at the series of events here, because I think that some people have skipped one of the most important pillars of Wikipedia: assume always good faith.
Buster7 did some _small_ changes (controversial it seems), they were reverted only 30 minutes later applying WP:NPOV, the edit war continued for around three hours (and Buster7, officially you did not break the 3RR, since the last revert occurred next day morning, but you were close to be blocked). I can see both editors argued in the talk page, but no consensus was reached (I do not see any search for consensus either), instead looking for sources for such a simple sentence was the only given solution ... also, Buster7 was never warned in this process about a potential 3RR. In my opinion, again, this is a result of not assuming good faith.
I can see Buster7 trying to compromise almost eight hours after the war started. Instead another war for another four hours occurred, when the first accusation happened on Buster7 talk page ...honestly, if the editor have checked Buster7 contribution history, the editor may understand that those attributions had no place at all there. Buster7 finally gave up at almost one day later after more accusations in his talk page, this is for me is unacceptable, but we are all humans...
I can see that finally some very good advice has been given by a couple of editors, but at what cost? A good editor like Buster7 has been insulted, with no reason, and probably offended and hurt at the point not wanting to contribute anymore in Wikipedia. If this happens that would be a hell of a loose, and nobody thought about that. No one assumed good faith on his comments and advice was not given properly, even when it is obvious that he is new in this space (no offense Buster7). We all make mistakes, we all have different point of views, we all have different cultural backgrounds ... as a result we all need to check our comments, and we all need to compromise and try to understand each other.
I would suggest to check Buster7 contributions and you will see this is not a troll behavior, at all. Best regards, and let's learn from our own mistakes, Miguel.mateo (talk) 08:05, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

One more thing b4 I go

I copied this from a "What is a troll"? page...somewhere
Rephrase. Often one is accused of being a troll because one is phrasing one's views in a particularly hostile way. Consider: are you openly advocating trolling on your userpage? Are you cursing at people or engaging in personal attacks? Are you accusing those who oppose you of being in a cabal? If you stopped that, people would probably respond better to you.
While I wasn't being in any way hostile or engaging in personal attacks I thought that might also mean to rephrase the entry. I was worth a try. By your demeanor you obviously think that it was very important that my edit not be included. OK! But,I think an editor has a right to defend his good faith editing. I knew that I never had consensus ("When that didn't work and the consensus was not in my favor, I [...]")...I was explaining my thought process for you and any other administrator that might read my replies, now or later. Also, so I would remember them. Also, the moving of comments was merely an attempt to keep everything together. I always clearly marked that they were Retrieved from elsewhere. There was no attempt at trickery or discountenance. If someone was offended by my actions.--Buster7 (talk) 22:44, 20 July 2008 (UTC)

Buster, you are absolutely correct, you've done nothing wrong, you added a relevant and accurate sentence that enhances the article, and have had it forcefully suppressed by other editors who don't appreciate the subtlety of its tone. It is they, not you, who are out of line with Wiki culture. This topic is not Osama bin Laden, nothing much hangs on this discussion except editors learning to work together, and human beings being what they are, co-operation is a learned skill. Alastair Haines (talk) 02:51, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Criticism

"The site uses an identical layout to Wikipedia which causes confusion to users, for example mistaking the content as factual." - do we really need that sentence? Just how much of a moron do you have to be to take an Uncylopedia article for real? Much less, to be unable to recognize the differences in layout between Uncylopedia and Wikipedia?? -- 134.102.101.61 (talk) 23:36, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Right, check this out. In particular note the IRC conversation about halfway down the page. Also, I was confused when I first visited Uncyclopedia, thinking it was part of Wikipedia itself. Granted, this was for less than a minute or two, but still, it's not an unfair assumption methinks. -- Hindleyite (talk) 15:10, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
Yea, it does happen. It's probably a very rare though. You noticed in less than a minute, and I doubt many people are seriously taken in by it. Probably not noteworthy enough for inclusion. MrN9000 (talk) 18:19, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
It aims to look like Wikipedia plus it has a source.--Otterathome (talk) 19:05, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Racism

A number of articles on Uncyclopedia use basically racist humour. The site manager acknowledges that some of the articles are racist ( see here) but claims that they get deleted. Does anyone have any refs about complaints about its racism?--MacRusgail (talk) 16:29, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

The first question would seem to be "What is the basis for this claim?" Can you provide examples of articles in which the humour is primarily based on racism? --Codeine (talk) 00:17, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
Also, having just perused that article thoroughly, a couple of points: firstly, JH is not the "site manager"; he was the founder of the site and the host before he transferred the domain and hosting to Wikia, and in fact, due to his many commitments he's barely involved in the site any more (unfortunately). Secondly, and more pertinently, there's nowhere in that interview where he mentions racism. In fact, the only mention of race on the entire page is in a third party comment: "Sure we delete a few articles but these are generally racist, overtly sexual or just plain tasteless and have no place outside a hate site." One more thing to consider; many of Uncyclopedia's articles are written by those who know the subject best - for example, I happen to know that many of the contributors to Jew for example, are Jewish themselves. Offensiveness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and I repeat my invitation to provide examples of overt racism on Uncyclopedia. I can assure you that any genuine examples of gross offensiveness without humourous content will be removed. -- Codeine (talk) 12:23, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
Well, so Uncyclopedia is racist, it's Islamophobic, its insensitive etc. So what's new here? I take the view that all kinds of humour can be found there, and it's inevitable that some of which will offend certain groups of people. Ethereal (talk) 13:05, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

removed image of the 'strange man'

I removed that image, although it was humorous it's not really relevant overall, plus the poor guy is apparantly already ridiculed at Inciclopedia, do we really need to further humiliate him on Wikipedia as well? Especially considering he's been identified by name in the caption. OlEnglish (talk) 03:01, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

No objection here. — Manticore 08:54, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Maybe more improvement.....

This article is a mess. However, we can add that Uncyclopedia received less numbers since the domain name change. Joe9320 of the Wikipedia Party | Contact Assembly of Jimbo Wales 09:31, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikia template

The links actually worked fine earlier, until all the trouble about external-vs-internal links, and even so... a broken template is no reason to remove it from the page - it's a reason to fix the template. I would like to re-add the template to this page. LobStoR (talk) 15:00, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Check the links work using the preview button before changing again. If you revert me again, they will still not be working properly.--Otterathome (talk) 15:07, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
I checked the preview, and as I said, and the links worked fine at the time, your complaint should be directed over at the template page, where the problem originated... Note that the problem occurred because I changed the template to provide external links (at your request), then your complaints that brought about the Full-Protection have prevented the template from being fixed to a working state. Please continue this discussion over on Template talk:Wikia. LobStoR (talk) 15:45, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Logo in sidebar

Do we really need a picture of the main page of Uncyclopedia in the sidebar at all? As it stands, the sidebar looks messy with the logo and main page picture. It would look much cleaner if we kept the logo there by itself and either just got rid of the main page picture altogether or placed it somewhere else on the page. Either way, I don't think we need both in the same small area, as it looks cluttered.

Also, if you want to use a picture of the main page, someone needs to screencap a new one, since the current one has "FUNcyclopedia" as the title. We need one from a regular day that has the regular title, not one from an April Fools' joke or something. -- Interrupt_feed (talk) 18:53, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

* {{Wikia | wikia | Wikia | Uncyclopedia | Uncyclopedia (article)}} should be removed from the external links section of this article. It is neither a comprehensive nor reliable list of Uncyclopedias, as it explicitly and by design excludes everything in *.uncyclopedia.kr (2 wikis) plus the entire content of three dedicated servers. Among the more notable omissions would be the two largest non-English Uncyclopedias, Desciclopédia™ and Ansaikuropedia. --66.102.80.212 (talk) 18:58, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Dutch explanation

--131.155.217.100 (talk) 20:29, 7 October 2009 (UTC) (tiM)

The article says:

The Dutch is called "Oncyclopedia Neerlandica"; "onzin" in Dutch means "nonsense".

I think the comment about the meaning of "onzin" should be removed. It is true that "onzin" means "nonsense", but I'm sure that this is not the reason for calling it "Oncyclopedia". The dutch prefix "on-" translates to English as "un-" (or dis-, im-, or in- in some cases) and vice versa. To put it in perspective: If the English word for nonsense was unsense, would you include this remark?

Note: There's a section "OnZinnen" on the Dutch Oncyclopedia which literally translates to: "nonsenses" or "unSentences".

Done; you might want to put your note in - Rothorpe (talk) 21:00, 7 October 2009 (UTC)

The project in Dutch was originally named "Onziclopedie", so did reference «onzin» as nonsense. --66.102.80.212 (talk) 16:23, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

Domain hacks?

I notice that the names "notícias" and "biblioteca" are listed (in that plaintext form) as domain hacks. It would appear that whomever last edited this text hasn't read the domain hack article or does not quite grasp the concept. A domain hack is a name which uses the entire URL, including everything after the '.'s, to spell out an identity, such as http://whocalled.us (who called us?) or (in Uncyclopaedia's case) http://unne.ws (UnNews). To edit in such a way as to remove all dots from the name removes the "domain hack". I'm presuming the article was originally correct and has been butchered by subsequent additions? --66.102.80.212 (talk) 20:38, 19 June 2010 (UTC)

Reference

Can someone find a reference that Uncyclopedia isn't even funny? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.113.222.37 (talk) 06:22, 20 June 2010 (UTC)

Are you willing to accept ED as WP:RS on this? --66.102.80.212 (talk) 18:56, 10 July 2010 (UTC)
I think ED would be questionable at best.--98.218.230.171 (talk) 04:55, 31 July 2010 (UTC)

I have removed some obsolete and spam links off of this page. Please let me know if this was done in error. Throw it in the Fire (talk) 22:52, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Topics - Italian Nonciclopedia

Guess I'm a little more dense than usual today. These are topics no longer allowed for parody? Ragityman (talk) 18:17, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

We need an more references

You know, like Fisher Price (AKA go eat shit fuckers) or similar? I think we should. - Another n00b (talk) 19:39, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Oncyclopedia

I translated the Dutch article on Oncyclopedia, but it was removed twice. I see why I need external sources, but do they need to be in English? As an Oncyclopolis checkuser, I know most of this information out the top of my head. FeyBart (talk) 07:54, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

The issue for me is beyond just a lack of external sources, it's the relevance of the content. The specific number of articles the wiki had throughout its' development, the number of contributors, the behaviour of administrators, blocks, etc. is just not relevant to an encyclopedia or this article. The projects the wiki has (though I personally don't see the need for them to be listed - not exclusive to Dutch), articles that have achieved public attention (if you list external sources for this) - that sort of thing is more acceptable. Just use the other languages as a guide. — Manticore 15:57, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

And in Others Language?

In Wikipédia BR we have a Counter of Articles, Oh, forgot. I am Brazilian


Em outros Idiomas

Alysson-G (talk) 19:37, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Logo overhauls

The English Uncyclopedia community recently decided to update almost all of their logos. This should be reflected in the article. --96.224.211.35 (talk) 11:41, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

SOPA Prank

Is the website of Uncyclopedia that has the prank on it itself not a sufficiently reliable source? http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/SOPA 74.207.254.63 (talk) 17:09, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Because Uncylopedia is an evil den of vandals. [citation needed] PuppyOnTheRadio talk
Of course it's reliable. The claim that there exists something and then demonstrating it by showing the actual thing is empirical proof. In this case it isn't about reliability of the source, it's about the content. The statement is 'there exists a page, here it is' and that claim is fully shown. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Muffin8or (talkcontribs) 22:07, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Blanked?

Has something happened to Uncyclopedia recently? All content has been replaced with a long red box. Discussion pages have it in white with a red outline. The source code shows that everything is fine, but nothing will show up.--Auric 03:21, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Figured it out. This happens when you have cookies blocked for the site. The red box is the content warning box.--Auric 00:53, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Wikia URL and Alexa rank

The English-language Uncyclopedia moved on January 5, 2013. Please stop re-inserting the old URL in place of the current one as a pretext to use Wikia's Alexa rank (*.wikia.com) in place of Uncyclopedia's Alexa rank. This is getting dangerously close to WP:3RR territory. K7L (talk) 17:35, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

He's obviously receiving money for that from Wikia. Russian Uncy faced the same "payed editors trying to harm the project" problem before. 217.15.199.234 (talk) 15:50, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Wikia fork is not "seemingly abandoned"

First, as an aside, it is not true that "The English-language Uncyclopedia moved" as stated in the previous section. There was a fork; some admins and users moved to a new site and some stayed at the Wikia-hosted site.

Today I edited the Intro and the section formerly named "Domain change" and now named "Fork" as the facts were not stated neutrally. The above user K7L added {{cn}} to request a citation for my assertion that "Development continues on both sites." The change history reads:

({{cn}} for claim that "development continues" on seemingly-abandoned Wikia fork)

I do not know what type of citation is proper. Surely the New York Times has not done an article about business-as-usual at the Wikia Uncyclopedia. But all the editing functions that worked on January 4 work today, albeit at different traffic levels, which vary over time. Why, just today Wikipedian "Aimsplode" (his personal pages redirect to the Wikipedia main page) was at the Wikia Uncyclopedia submitting requests to delete discussion pages he had opened. It is he who edited this Wikipedia article at about the time of the fork to describe the Wikia site as "deprecated" and functioning only as a "sandbox."

It is outrageous to assert that the Wikia-hosted website is "seemingly abandoned." There is nothing you can do at that website that will give the impression of abandonment. Now, my edits here were not biased toward either fork; I even listed the respective URLs in opposite order in the two sections I edited. The users who initiated the fork are still using Wikipedia as one of many battlegrounds to lure traffic to their copy of Uncyclopedia--with deception. Spike-from-NH (talk) 02:44, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Odd you should mention the New York Times as that is what is being used to document the Wikivoyage/Wikitravel split. Then again, I'd settle for le Quotidien de Chicoutimi. Ultimately, though, this article is a mess of claims cited to nothing other than Uncyclopedia itself (or, worse yet, shaky claims that the Alexa rank for *.wikia.com as a whole somehow prove that "development continues" at Wikia's fork of Uncyclopedia. If the source doesn't say that, don't put it in the article. This page has serious WP:RS issues which lost it WP:GA status, don't make them worse. K7L (talk) 20:08, 10 February 2013 (UTC)
Fair point relating to the Alexa rank if the link was not post scripted. The Alexa rank does reflect *.wikia.com as an overall. The postscript refers to Uncyclopedia as being the 13th most “popular” sub-domain on *.wikia.com overall.
Given that the phrase was more related to both sites “under development” I've added a link to Special:RecentChanges for both sites as well.
As for the removal of the GA status in this article, that was a significant time ago, and has since had significant rewrites from a number of editors. Recently due to the fork a significant number of editors have also been adding inaccuracies and removing the NPOV. Removing factual information that is well cited by a source that is Wikipedia recommended by {{Infobox Website}} doesn't support this article or help it to regain it's GA status. Supporting an non-NPOV is downright damaging. PuppyOnTheRadio talk 00:07, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
Alexa is not WP:RS as it's based on a self-selected sample. It also doesn't even pretend to measure whether a site is "under development". Inserting 'information' that isn't in the cited 'source' isn't going to fix the problems that lost this page its GA status, only worsen them. Too much here is uncited or cited to Uncyclopedia itself, which is not the most reliable source for anything. K7L (talk) 00:16, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
The information is in the source site, and highlighted by the post-script. I wouldn't rely on the Alexa rank for either page as a true indication of popularity, especially given it's trying to quantify the unquantifiable based upon a select sample. Unfortunately that's what all ratings systems use. It is a suggested indicator (as shown by it's inclusion on the template as stated above) and does reflect - in very broad strokes - a portrait of site relevance. I agree that it has no way of reflecting of a site is “under development” but it does reflect that a site has vibrancy. As for citing Recent Changes - I avoid citing pages on a wiki or a forum that are editable by anyone - much the same as I wouldn't site Wikipedia to support a different Wikipedia article. But citing pages that reflect the edit activity on a site - and are unable to be manually adjusted - is a different matter.
In short, the citations are relevant for supporting that both sites are active and being regularly edited. As an indication of “under development” there is little else that could be more relevant. Otherwise saying Wikipedia itself is an active site that is being developed by a worldwide community is impossible, but you and I know that this is factual. PuppyOnTheRadio talk 13:05, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
Utterly false. One can find news articles very easily which state that Wikipedia is active and use it as the basis for an explanation of wikis in general. That is a reliable source. Wikia's Alexa rank is not, especially if what you are trying to quantify is not Wikia but Uncyclopedia and not readership but actual development (ie: editors). The claims must be removed as you are inferring things not in the original cited "source". K7L (talk) 17:16, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
References to these sites being “under development” have been altered to reflect facts as displayed. Do you have an example of those news articles you were referring to about Wikipedia? PuppyOnTheRadio talk 18:57, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
Alastair Jamieson (25 Nov 2009). "Wikipedia project 'losing contributors in record numbers'". Telegraph Media Group Limited. The study, conducted by Felipe Ortega at Libresoft, a research group at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, analysed the editing history of more than three million active Wikipedia contributors in ten different languages. {{cite news}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |trans_title= (help) K7L (talk) 01:11, 12 February 2013 (UTC)
Thank you. A little dated, but interesting reading. I wonder if the treatment of irregular users on here with limited fields of specialty is a contributing factor to finishing contributors. PuppyOnTheRadio talk 05:22, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

its logo is not a hollow potato it is a melted brown wikipedia logo. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.64.204.48 (talk) 22:10, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

logo

i take it back — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.64.204.48 (talk) 22:12, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Using Wikipedia citations as a tool to divert traffic

Overnight, 2001:5c0:1400:a::34d changed many of the links in the article from the Wikia-hosted site to the newer Fork site, with the comment, "fix outdated URL." I reverted, stating, "'Fix outdated url' is as inaccurate as the earlier 'seemingly abandoned' summary; Anon changes links in references to guide traffic to 'fork' site."

"Seemingly abandoned" refers to a dishonest Change Summary of K7L on 9-Feb-13.

K7L has reverted my change, stating, "replacing links with Wikia equivalents is not constructive if the majority of users have left Wikia."

Very sneaky! First of all, it is Anon and K7L changing the article; I did nothing more "unconstructive" than restore the prior text. Shifting the burden of proof is a tactic K7L used in the last foray here, a discussion now oddly hidden in Archive 1 not Archive 4. Secondly, here and with the "seemingly abandoned" comment earlier, K7L uses polemic in a Change Summary knowing it doesn't have to be sourced. The article does not have readership or authorship stats with which to compare the two offshoots; nor should Wikipedia guide readers interested in an article's citations to a given site on the principle of greater numbers.

I am reverting and solicit comments from uninvolved third parties. Spike-from-NH (talk) 19:27, 26 March 2013 (UTC)

The source for the move is [5]. The article had the new URL, but one user inexplicably removed it and added bogus claims passing Wikia's traffic stats off as Uncyclopedia's. I'm just reverting to put the new URL back as any removal of valid, sourced info about the move was done without consensus. 2001:5C0:1000:A:0:0:0:B59 (talk) 23:14, 26 March 2013 (UTC)
Firstly, I'd ask that you don't start edit warring - it would be counter productive. Secondly, there was no stage where the stats for Wikia overall were put forward as the stats for Uncyclopedia.wikia.com. In looking at the source page it reflected quite definitively that Uncyclopeda attracted 1.1% of the overall Wikia traffic. That made it (at the time) the 13th most viewed page. Thridly, this is an article about Uncyclopedia that is based on Wikipedia. Wikipedia relies upon verifiable fact, and the inclusion of forums does not count as verifiable fact. Even in the details of the forum that you have linked there are arguments against the terminology of "moving" as opposed to "forking". In defining Uncyclopedia as a community it is now apparent that it spreads across two different sites (excluding any mirror sites). As such both sites should be included in the text in this page, which is what has been done. This provides an NPOV, which is the ideal for all articles. In relationship to pages that are referring to historical events on the site - if the event being described happened centered on the site located at the independent fork, this should be included as the source. For events happening prior to 8th January they should refer back to uncylopedia.wikia.com as the primary source of information. (Especially given when presented with a primary source and a secondary source - which many of the pages of the fork are ported from the original - the primary source is the ideal. It's the difference between Cyrano de Bergerac and Roxanne.)
Having said that, there are gaps in knowledge within this article relating to the management and hosting of the independent site, and the way that it is funded. Some of these questions have been answered on the independent site, and that information would be relevant to the article here. I haven't gone through and examined what has happened at the independent site since 8th January in any detail - being predominantly familiar with the Wikia based site. If you are looking at updating this page then including that information would be useful. I'd probably start by adding details of the press release of the independent site. I'd also look at including the Alexa traffic rank of the two sites as well, but highlighting exactly what is mentioned above.
Above all, please keep in mind that Wikipedia is not a platform for advertising, but an information resource. While the natural inclination of experts in an area is to incorporate personal feelings in with edits, in order to keep an NPOV you can't allow yourself to start talking about the Wikia URL being "outdated" or redundant, as it is still a valid Uncyclopedia page, with an active community and active edits being made. PuppyOnTheRadio talk —Preceding undated comment added 01:51, 27 March 2013 (UTC)

Note - I've lefts notes on Spike and PotR's talkpages asking them to distance themselves from this article due to their clear conflict of interest as users on the Wikia side of the split. As a user involved in the other side, I would prefer to stay out of this particular discussion, however. -— Isarra 19:10, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Given that an anonymous user made the change, and I merely reverted it and brought the topic here for discussion--where my revert is claimed to be more controversial than the original anonymous edit: Going to my talk page to induce me to unwatch this article is not "staying out of this particular discussion." It is defending your proprietary website with a maneuver on the flank, where the main battle is conveniently waged by Anon. Spike-from-NH (talk) 19:58, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

"The fork site's ownership and management is not disclosed."

While this is entirely untrue (the former is already in the infobox, and the latter has some project-space mentions on the new site that probably would be citable even if they do appear to be jokes at first glance - because yes, it really is run be a team of angry developers), should such information even go in the article without some sort of reliable source to back up not just its validity, but especially its relevance? Given that it has verifiability on neither count, I would suggest the statement be removed, but due to my own involvement in the matter would prefer not to do so myself. Thanks. -— Isarra 19:17, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

I've opened a thread on the 4 currently listed External links at Wikipedia:External links/Noticeboard#Uncyclopedia. --Dirk Beetstra T C 08:15, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

And Admins from both sites have now weighed in there. In my opinion, the upshot is that this article should not declare either the Wikia site or the Fork "official." Spike-from-NH (talk) 13:10, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

"How To Be Funny And Not Just Stupid"

The Intro refers to Wikia "guidelines regarding...content [that] have become stricter over time" in a context that suggests that they were a motive for the fork. But the cited document is merely a guide to writing comedy; if it was ever used to reject contributions, this was by the same people who executed the fork; and it is unrelated, in authors or timeframe, with Wikia's obscenity ban, which was clearly one motive for the fork. The document might figure into a discussion of management differences between the two sites (though I could not provide citations) but does not relate to the decision to execute a fork. I'm inclined to omit this citation and streamline this text, but wanted to mention it here first. Spike-from-NH (talk) 13:10, 29 September 2013 (UTC) Done. Spike-from-NH (talk) 20:33, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

Russian Uncyclopedia (Absurdopedia)

I won't edit this article myself as I'm quite involved in the topic, but my impression is that the independent Absurdopedia was not a 'comparable fork' but rather a 'move':

  • This forum suggests strongly that most, if not all, of the contributors decided to leave the Wikia version. "[A]ll bureaucrat and admin rights were removed", according to a Wikia staff member; would this have been done if some, but not all, of the admins had left? I think not. Also, "All the community has left Wikia and moved to its own server." according to another user. No user of the wiki, aside from staff members (who imho can't really be considered members of the community in most cases, but that's another topic), framed this as a fork.
  • The Special:UserLogin page on the independent site contains some text referencing Absurdopedia's move from Wikia. (I don't read much Russian but it seems clear that's what it's talking about; новый сервер is 'new server'.) This may be a weaker source but it still seems to say the same thing.
  • The number of active users on the fork (active user list; recent changes) is greater than the number on the original site (user list; recent changes).

In short, it seems that to say 'Absurdopedia forked from wikia' is restating Wikia's opinion and not what actually happened. I'm not sure it would be quite neutral either to say that it moved from wikia. I would suggest something along the lines of this:

The community at Absurdopedia, the Russian version, decided to leave Wikia and set up an independent version. Wikia staff considered this to be a fork and kept the original wiki open for editing. Promotion of the new website was also disallowed by means of removing the rights of all administrators and blocking users who inserted links to the new site or said that it had moved; Wikia said that these actions were necessary because the users were committing vandalism. As of 2013, users who insert statements that Absurdopedia has moved are still being blocked for it.

Is this an improvement? I think it is but would like to hear another opinion on it, preferably from someone who does not edit Uncyclopedia (or at least has not been blocked for saying that the wiki has moved, as I was). Cathfolant (talk) 23:03, 8 October 2013 (UTC)

Not sure how to source this... the government censorship is easily sourced [6] but info on the Wikia censorship mostly appears on Wikia or Uncyclopedia itself. [7] Using Uncyclopedia as a reliable source for anything is marginal, even if Wikia is admitting to the censorship and has done the same sort of thing to other communities. 2001:5C0:1400:A:0:0:0:481 (talk) 00:30, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
That a wiki forked is an uncontroversial statement. That "the community decided to leave" or that the fork is exactly what the other site was, somewhere else, is overt advocacy. Both Russian sites are something, and it would help this article to explain exactly what, if you can do that factually and objectively.
Wikia's English Uncyclopedia has comparable Terms of Use that, among other things, actively discourage its users from using it to send traffic elsewhere, which seems like an eminently reasonable condition for free use of servers. We haven't banned anyone for this issue, but we have mostly enforced it by editing documents that are supposed to be personal when the owner does not bring them into compliance. If Cathfolant is so convinced of the need to point Wikia users to the new location of the "same" wiki, I am not surprised that it led to a ban and I don't think Cathfolant is a victim of rough treatment, nor is it notable that a fork led to interpersonal friction.
Real measurement of the relative traffic on the two forks would be a useful addition to the article. Assertions of the forks themselves are not to be believed, though a Wikia document describing Wikia policy should be authoritative for that use. A declaration that the real Uncyclopedia (or "the community") is here and not there is not objective. Spike-from-NH (talk) 02:55, 9 October 2013 (UTC)
I looked at the Wikia fork of en.Uncyclopedia and read some of what you were doing there. Clearly you want uncyclopedia.co and a few related sites to vanish. At this point, it would appear your involvement is WP:COI. K7L (talk) 03:01, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
Thank you for the replies. See if I can answer all of them:
2001:5C0:1400:A:0:0:0:481: yes, we will have to use Uncyclopedia as a source, and it is primary. It is used elsewhere in the article, though, so it should be either totally excluded as a source or used for what it can provide.
Spike:
  • Advocacy is not my goal here; if it were I would not have brought any of this up at all. My concern is that the wording 'a comparable fork [to the English version]' suggests that part of the community is still at Wikia, a statement that is nothing more than opinion. From a technical standpoint, yes, of course it is a fork, but the wording in the article seems to suggest that the community forked (because the English community did and I think the article implies this), which is not verifiable. You seem to be saying that it is uncontroversial to say that the site forked, whereas to me it looks like Wikia's opinion is being stated as fact. Wikia staff members are not a reliable source, and no one but them (and Wikipedia) has referred to it as a fork.
  • I have decided that it's not notable to point out that one can get blocked for inserting links to the new site. Also, I'm not sure how relevant it is that '[you] haven't banned anyone for this issue', but it isn't true. (I refer to the blocks made with the summary 'Violation of Wikia's Terms of Use'.)
  • The way I originally wrote the paragraph is not neutral, yes, and this is why I now think it would be better to cite statements made by both sides and active user statistics but not to draw any conclusions on our own.
K7L: you are right, though I'd say he doesn't want them to vanish so much as be ignored and treated as impostors. I also don't think he has let his COI influence the article very noticeably, so maybe your comment is a bit uncalled for? Finally, my conflict of interest is about as strong as Spike's. [8] [9] Cathfolant (talk) 20:50, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
Cathfolant, thank you for agreeing that interpersonal friction following a fork is not suitable material for articles here.
I have no opinion on whether the Russian fork was "comparable" to the English fork, and did not add that assertion. Wikipedia should not imply any similarities without documenting them. Fork seems to me a neutral term that means there was one copy of the database and there are now two. Non-neutral terms would include "the community moved" versus, say, the renegades quit. I have used the polemic of referring to our competitor as the "impostor Uncyclopedia" there, but of course not here. (While here, an Admin at the Fork has just counseled me on my talk page, not for the first time, to pursue happiness and avoid sanction by simply unwatching this page.)
I did find one case (5-Sep) where I banned a user, who knew better, from advertising the other site in his signature, amid concurrent incivility. I usually cite "Terms of Use" meaning persistent uploading of porn, which is not what we're discussing here. Spike-from-NH (talk) 21:51, 10 October 2013 (UTC)
Fork infers that both versions are active and each has some of the original contributors still active. Is this true? K7L (talk) 03:00, 11 October 2013 (UTC)
Both versions are indeed active, and each does have some of the original contributors from before the split happened. The community of active registered users at the uncyclopedia.wikia.com may be smaller than the community at en.uncyclopedia.co, or may not be, but both sites are attracting new contributors, and continue to be edited and maintained. Proof of this (editing and maintaining) is not the kind of thing that can be provided in a single citation, or even a group of citations, since both sites continue to change constantly. And a few of those in the community edit both sites, like myself, though I do most of my work on the Wikia site since I am an administrator there. --Userafw (talk) 03:54, 13 October 2013 (UTC)
Userafw, you are right but you are talking about the English sites. I was talking about the Russian ones, which can be proved to have distinctly different levels of activity (though explicitly saying so would be original research). The sources to cite in this case would be Special:ActiveUsers and Special:RecentChanges, and I'm thinking we'd give access dates to avoid the problem of their being in constant flux. That would probably work for the English uncycs as well, though I think the article's coverage of that part is ok and doesn't need to be changed much.
When no further information is given other than 'the wiki forked', it suggests that there are now two communities, as K7L said. This is true of the English version but not, it seems, of the Russian one. Though there are a few editors from time to time, I don't think any of them were there before the fork.
'The renegades quit' is not neutral wording, as I think you know, Spike. Your comment seems to imply that it is. The point in bringing up what you have said on Uncyclowikia is that you have a conflict of interest, which of course you do. If you can keep it out of Wikipedia, that's great; but it's still there. (On the other hand, I seem to actually say on my user page why I left Uncyclowikia.) Cathfolant (talk) 18:05, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
Of course I don't think "The renegades quit" is neutral wording, but only equally non-neutral to your "the community moved." I don't know the Russian situation (but I recently cited you in editing this article to remove the assertion that the Russian situation was a "comparable" fork) but brought up the English Uncyclopedia above because the Wikia policy there might be informative as to the Wikia policy on the Russian site. No, I try to edit carefully despite my involvement with the Wikia site. I go as far as not flogging my grievances there on my user page here. Spike-from-NH (talk) 22:57, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
What does "the Wikia policy" have to do with anything? Wikia doesn't own the content, the authors do. The community has every right to move. K7L (talk) 23:00, 14 October 2013 (UTC)
The community has a right to move but not to leave a forwarding address or say that it was a move. That it why it's a fork. The same Wikia policy applies to all Wikia wikis. I don't see though how it can be used to support a citation of events that happened, though; Wikia policy should in my opinion only be cited as a source for what it itself says, not a source (or explanation) for actions taken or somesuch. Cathfolant (talk) 21:14, 15 October 2013 (UTC)
Anon was by, and deleted the paragraph on the Russian fork entirely as "not relevant." I reverted him, but think the text should give both Russian URLs without value judgments apart from metrics that we can cite. Spike-from-NH (talk) 23:03, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

Ownership of the fork

Here we go again. Regarding the Fork of the English-language website, this article states, "The fork site's ownership and management is not disclosed." Yesterday, WPjcm removed that sentence, with the summary: removing statement for lyrithya. Lyrithya, known here as Isarra, is part of the ownership/management of that site. She has worked through proxies here before, not appearing personally except to do things like cajole me on my talk page to choose a happier life by Unwatching this article. I am concerned that not intervening on this minor edit will lead the Forkers to resume using Wikipedia as a battlefield to wrestle for readership with the Wikia-owned site, where I am an Admin.

The last I knew, the sentence in question is true; the Fork's ownership is not disclosed. WPjcm cannot claim the assertion is not important; dissatisfaction with a variety of Wikia policies was the stated reason for the Fork. This dissatisfaction, met on the other side with suspicion about the mysterious ownership of the Fork, is in discussion pages already cited in the article. If WPjcm is instead claiming the assertion is not true, let him instead replace the sentence with a pointer to documentation of the Fork's ownership and control. In the meantime, I revert. Let Lyrithya/Isarra/et al not argue, again, that their edit is not controversial but that the revert is. Spike-from-NH (talk)

What are you talking about? Do you know how to look up a domain name? Who owns Wikia? Do you know the names of every single investor? The current sentence is silly and petty. Legoktm (talk) 23:17, 23 December 2013 (UTC)
I'm not a proxy of Lyrithya. You may know me as UPjcm on Uncyclopedia, and I only removed that sentence because I saw a statement by Lyrithya in one the archives of this very talk page. It made good enough sense to me when I saw it, but if it's that big a deal to you that the sentence stays in, then I don't really care either way. ~jcm 23:42, 23 December 2013 (UTC)

Notability of the fork (again)

Two editors have removed text with details on the fork of the English Uncyclopedia, stating the case that it is not notable when individuals take a private copy of a wiki for further parallel development. This should be pursued through discussion here and not a revert war; and those discussing should look in the archives of this page at previous discussions of the same question. Spike-from-NH (talk) 11:35, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Just to note, I have not argued that the private copy of the wiki for further parallel development is notable or not. --Dirk Beetstra T C 12:17, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

(Perhaps something is missing from your sentence. Your edit supports an argument that this move was not notable.) But Userafw, reverting the initial deletion (not yours), added a citation. To quote your Change Summary, do you claim that this citation does not settle the issue, or that it is not "independent coverage showing notability"? Spike-from-NH (talk) 23:02, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

"As user:Otterathome says, there is NO independent coverage showing notability of the fork, please cite that first" - I am clearly speaking about 'showing notability'
Userafw added a citation alright, but maybe that citation was in style with uncyclopedia: an unreliable, unindependent and uninformative source - A substract to a not-accepted WikiMania paper submitted by people involved by the site/fork. Hence my revert-remark. To answer your question, yes, I claim that a not accepted paper does not settle the issue, and it is certainly not independent. Moreover: "Various (30 April 2013). "The rebirth of Uncyclopedia: the story of a community that decided to take its hosting into its own hands". Wikimania 2013. Retrieved 19 January 2014." - authors of the paper, Kim Schoonover, Kunal Mehta, are clearly stated, as is their affiliation "Uncyclomedia Cabal" and their web-page. "Various" does not really cover the naming of those editors.
Somewhat related, I just noticed that the fork is again at the top of the list of sites, while the page is about the original, and we haven't even established the notability of the fork. --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:47, 21 January 2014 (UTC) (I see that Otterathome also removed that, I was checking an old revid of the article --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:49, 21 January 2014 (UTC)).

The independently-operated Uncyclopedia is, in fact, not a "private copy...for further parallel development". It is simply being crushed by Google's page-ranking because it contains duplicate material. Just as with the old site, anyone may edit, and anyone may become a registered user. In fact, it's simpler to join the independent site; an email address is not required, whereas the Wikia-owned site requires a valid email address. 2601:1:C100:306:587D:563E:BF2E:F565 (talk) 00:28, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

"Private fork" is incorrect; the community largely got up and left; but nobody in the press has noted this, because nobody cares about either Uncyclopedia in 2013-14. This is akin to the problem I noted at Talk:Citizendium/Archive_4#So_what_and_how_do_we_write_about_this_sort_of_thing.3F - things that used to be somewhat notable and still exist, but have no sources since then The actual answer is probably for the uncyclopedia.co crew to get out there and get some press coverage, of course. Assuming they care either - David Gerard (talk) 08:53, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

But is that not true for a lot of dead people as well - after a bit of time, all you get is regurgitation of the old material, nothing really new comes out (except for highly influential people) - the article is what it is, it contains what there is to say, and that is it. Strip out the non-notable and unreferenced material, polish it into a reasonable shape and the article is, practically, 'finished' for life (barring restarts, resurrection or divine intervention). --Dirk Beetstra T C 11:39, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
David, the actual answer for the anonymous user writing above (with the usual conviction that his new home cannot be a mere copy, and that he'd have readers were it not for Google) is to use Wikipedia to boost readership, as when he modified the balance achieved between the two sites in previous discussion here. This, Beetstra, stands in the way of "finishing" the article. Separately, I accept your reasoning above why Userafw's citation was not independent coverage; but believe that the places where you now call for citation (such as the fact that the original site is operated by Wikia) do not need them. I accept your argument that Wikia-versus-fork does not belong in the lede, but this was worked out in a previous round to try not to take a position between the two websites. Spike-from-NH (talk) 08:45, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
The split has not been reported hardly anywhere outside of the wikia world, and certainly not somewhere independent ánd reliable (a blog, an attempted paper) - that fact is not notable, and hence, should be removed altogether. The reason I ask for the other references is because I doubt that that can be independently source either. That sentence can probably be truncated up to the first {{fact}} tag (that part of the sentence is more matter-of-fact-like, what happened afterwards .. --Dirk Beetstra T C 09:28, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
The need for citation is balanced out for the need to have a neutral point of view. In my opinion, removing all references to the fork would appear to bias Wikipedia, given the nature of the dynamics between the two sites. Usually, citation is needed when something is controversial, and the existence of the fork is not controversial. How much of the community moved is controversial, and the fact that both sites are active, was already discussed earlier here. Removing all mention of the fork on the grounds that it is unnotable invites Wikipedia to become a battleground, since I think you will not find consensus that it is unnotable, as many of the community members who left for the fork edit here. Moreover, not every fact in every Wikipedia article (for example, the expansion packs listed for The Sims) has an independent source, nor should it need to. Sometimes sources are reliable, but not independent. EA Games, for instance, is the source of much of the information in the articles relating to their games. As the developer of those games, it is not an independent third party. Userafw (talk) 23:15, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
I am shocked by these remarks, Userafw, this is a complete misinterpretation of our policies and guidelines, and a disregard of others. --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:40, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
Please give me more details. How is this a misinterpretation of the policies and procedures, and who is being disregarded? Are everyone's interests being considered here? Userafw (talk) 07:29, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
WP:NPOV still needs the material to be properly referenced, otherwise it is giving WP:UNDUE weight to not-notable 'facts'.
"I think you will not find consensus that it is unnotable, as many of the community members who left for the fork edit here" - their !voting should be simply disregarded, they are not a neutral party, they have a WP:COI - editors who are not active on Uncyclopedia should discuss and determine the consensus, and although the COI-members can have their say, they should not carry any weight in the outcome. I therefore do not see how removal of the fork invites Wikipedia to become a WP:BATTLEground.
Bringing in that facts in EA Games or The Sims are not sourced is not a reason that things here would not need a source - maybe the actually need a source there as well (see WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS). The situation there however is completely different from this situation. --Dirk Beetstra T C 08:08, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
I just finished reading WP:UNDUE, and though it specifies the need for reliable sources, it does not seem to insist that those reliable sources be independent. Please understand that there are potentially two groups with COI here: those from uncyclopedia.wikia.com or Wikia, and those from en.uncyclopedia.co. If you have been to the forums on either site, you will find that the culture in both sites is such that the sites would each like to forget about the other. Removing references to one site or the other would appear to be siding with the other site, and would mean this article would have to be constantly patrolled since that information is likely to be added back by someone. I think this is a much different situation than promoting quackery or conspiracy theories. To go back to my example with the Sims, some of the expansion packs have been reviewed by third party gaming magazines, but not all of them. Less independent sites, such as Sims fan sites, have reviewed all of them. Does this mean that we should cover only some of the expansion packs released for the game? My opinion in that situation is that to list some but not all released expansion packs would be to leave a noticeable hole in the information available. Userafw (talk) 14:22, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
Whether or not it needs independent sources is depending on the nature of the claim.
Of course there are two groups with COI here, that does not change the matter that their opinion should not weigh in in a discussion, nor should they be extensively editing the page here themselves. And your suggestion that one would be picking sides when editing the page towards one side or the other is gaming involvement. And there is also no problem with that this page needs constant patrolling, that is automatically done with watchlists.
Regarding Sims: So what? That is not a reason to keep or include things here, make your arguments why this is notable enough to keep here and let independent editors decide whether it should or should not be included. --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:45, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

I also continue supporting ensuring that this article does not seem to side with either site, but agree with Beetstra that citing a diary of the Forkers themselves is equivalent to having no citation at all. If I do something claimed to be non-notable, citing my writings about it doesn't settle the claim. Regarding the state of the gaming page: Two wrongs don't make a right.

Given the degree to which the lede has been neutered (now even omitting either URL from the Infobox), I'd support merging the final paragraph into the description of the same thing inside "History" (where there are citations, such as they are) (and, separately, getting rid of the description of the "SOPA prank": It is not notable that Uncyclopedia sometimes turns the entire site and its main page into a joke, nor that once it shut down completely for a day, nor that you can continue viewing past pranks, and it remains documented here as continuing advocacy against SOPA in its newer incarnations). Spike-from-NH (talk) 15:14,15:16, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

PS--On second thought, although the above is a reasonable outcome (given the neutering of the lede), I don't think it is the best, as the fact that there are multiple websites is essential to understanding the subject and does deserve to be in the lede. What ought to happen is to walk back all of this month's changes, both from Beetstra/Otterathome's belief that the lede (as it wound up from the previous debate) was making wild assertions, and Anon's belief that it needs to treat his website better. Spike-from-NH (talk) 14:42, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Only regarding the PS. There are subjects that are not notable enough for an own article, or for a mention, even if it would, obviously, improve the understanding of said subject to have that article. I think a short mention in the history section could be fine, but since I do not see anyone outside of the direct surroundings care about the split, I would certainly not put this in the lede - I am afraid that for the lede it stops about at the takeover by Wikia, the rest can be mentioned in the history section, as long as it does not get a lot of disproportional weight with respect to the rest of that section. --Dirk Beetstra T C 03:45, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
This article appears to be about a group of wikis in multiple languages; most of the wikis listed here link to "en.uncyclopedia.co" as their English-language version - with the only notable exceptions being languages which are hosted by Wikia and do not have control over the interwiki links table. It's been a while since I've looked at these, but the split has had a huge effect on the project - whether good or bad is for history to decide - and therefore should be duly noted, much like the Wikitravel mess is noted in Wikivoyage. K7L (talk) 17:33, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
".. the split has had a huge effect on the project .." - that is exactly what we should then have reliable sources for. --Dirk Beetstra T C 07:48, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Original Research (again)

David Gerard has slapped OR on this article. In case this is not simply extending his above assertion that nobody cares, to an assertion that nobody should care, occasional contributor PuppyOnTheRadio has reread the article and tells me the only OR he detects is the documentation of the stated reasons for creating the Fork site. I was proud of my editing here, which replaced 95 Theses against Wikia with a neutral summary; but I concede that we will never be able to verify this apart from statements by the individuals themselves of what their intentions were. Hearing no objection, I will remove both the rationale for the creation of the Fork and the tag on the article. Spike-from-NH (talk) [11:57, 17 February 2014 (UTC)]

This is now done. Spike-from-NH (talk) 11:44, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
You are in a huge WP:COI in editing here, given your connection to the project. I am reverting your deletions of information from the article. K7L (talk) 21:17, 22 February 2014 (UTC)
Then, on the real issue, are you asserting that the text I deleted, and you restored, is objectively verifiable? Of course not, because it isn't; you are just arguing ad hominem regarding my "connection to the project"--which neatly sidesteps the issue of your connection to the project. Spike-from-NH (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 23:57, 23 February 2014‎
Ych y fi...
Yes, Spike, this is most definitely a COI and this is why Lyrithya and I would not remove stuff like that from the article without discussion, so you should not have done that either. We all know how involved you are and a great many of us think your opinions are not accurate, and though that last bit may not be relevant to anything you should not be editing this. There are citable sources for the reasons behind the creation of the fork just as much as there are for the rest of the site; while they are primary sources, if primary sources were not acceptable here it would have to go to afd, which I wonder if it should anyway.
I will revert any further edits by Spike to this (assuming I catch them before someone else does - thank you K7L), and if doing so would cross the 3 revert rule I will go to the noticeboard, and we shall have to see where it goes from there. Cathfolant (talk) 02:29, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
Also, I think I will note here that I believe Spike's way of turning every doubt cast on him into an accusation directed at the other editor, something that has repeatedly surfaced on this talk page as well as on Uncyclopedia, is inappropriate and a violation of WP:AGF and possibly WP:NPA. I assume you will disregard this, Spike, since you know my position on this matter and possibly even who I am, but you are not the only one who can act on my observation (though of course I hope it doesn't have to come to that). Cathfolant (talk) 02:50, 28 February 2014 (UTC)
I think Spike was trying to remove the edits that he thought triggered the original research tag to be placed. Perhaps a citation needed tag on those edits would have sufficed. If Uncyclopedia editors have a COI, then you too have a COI, and this information may be contested not by Spike, but rather by the independent editors who do not edit Wikipedia who have removed the information about the fork as unnotable. Saying you will revert all of one specific editor's future edits to an article, is also a violation of WP:AGF, and possibly WP:NPA. If you check the history of the Uncyclopedia article, removal of most of the information about the fork was not done by Spike. Instead, the balance between the two sides was upset by an "independent" editor, who could even be someone who no longer edits Uncyclopedia because they became disgruntled with the site. All we know however, is that they do not currently edit Uncyclopedia, and do not want anyone who edits Uncyclopedia to have a vote in the contents of the article. Userafw (talk) 10:19, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Indeed. Cathfolant, on "remov[ing] stuff like that from the article without discussion," the discussion is in the previous section and this is a continuation of edits by Beetstra, who seems to be uninvolved with the websites, also David Gerard, who takes pride in no longer being involved. I am an Admin at the Wikia site and have taken care to keep my edits to this article neutral, mostly removing obsolete text and toning down the various screeds against Wikia; and you are Llwy-ar-Lawr, who edits on the Fork site, and on several other Wikia properties to divert traffic to the Fork site.

Again, the edit in question removes the stated rationale for forming the Fork, which it has been argued at length is not verifiable except by citing the opinions of the people doing it. That is why your message above relies on threats against me and your claims that "a great many of us think your opinions are not accurate." My opinions are not all inaccurate, and of course that barb sidesteps the task of identifying the inaccuracy here. Spike-from-NH (talk) 12:16, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

I wouldn't say I take pride in no longer being involved ... I stop by occasionally, but not a whole lot. There's nothing inherently wrong with a wiki contributor removing OR from an article about that wiki, COI is not entirely clear in that aspect, and this invocation of it is coming across as querulous - David Gerard (talk) 13:01, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Userafw is right. Spike is not right in most of what he said and I feel no need to go into detail because there is nothing I can say that will do any good.

I would like to know exactly why the fork's link is not in the external links, though. It's certainly relevant enough, I should think. Cathfolant (talk) 18:42, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Conflict of interest editing to Uncyclopedia

I've opened a noticeboard thread on Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Uncyclopedia. This is a Wikipedia article. It is not part of Uncyclopedia itself, and is not an appropriate forum for administrators of whatever version of the English-language Uncyclopedia to be removing information in blatant violation of WP:COI. K7L (talk) 17:11, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

Criticism and controversy

This section strikes me as ridiculously overlong; no one cares about tiny tempest-in-a-teapot events. Are the King's College/Northern Ireland/Stropshire controversies really important to anyone? Do they contribute significantly to the article? Could they, at best, be replaced with a single sentence saying that Uncyclopedia has produced articles that have been criticized by various bodies?

I also think the Video Professor incident truly amounted to nothing; a single cease-and-desist letter was sent out.

I find the only truly notable things here to be:

  • The Malaysian Internal Security Ministry's directive
  • The PRC's block of the site
  • The Absurdopedia prohibition (but significantly abridged from the enormous wall of text).

Thoughts? I'd be happy to cut it down to a more reasonable size. KarakasaObake (talk) 23:05, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Yay another neutral editor stepping in. Sure, go ahead, do as you see fit. On your edit to update the info on the number of articles, I will note that the fork (or whatever you would prefer to call it) has between 29k and 30k articles (see here), whereas only the wikia version has over 30k; you may wish to note that, or you may not. Cathfolant (talk) 23:18, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
Well, just to be clear, I do have my thoughts on the handling of the fork situation (which others may not share) - but I also want to improve the article, period. KarakasaObake (talk) 23:25, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
I've made extensive edits and removed a lot of unsourced and questionably noteworthy content. KarakasaObake (talk) 00:06, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

I've reverted Otterathome

Because he or she is edit-warring reflexively at this point. But let me just make three points:

  1. The article was full of out-of-date information sourced by dead links that I quite properly removed;
  2. While certainly we can't write about anything that isn't reliably sourced, external links aren't sourced at all, and there is no more justification for "blacklisting" the en.uncyclopedia.co link than there is for "blacklisting" the uncyclopedia.wikia.com link.
  3. It is inaccurate to call en.uncyclopedia.co "the fork." There is no "official" version of Uncyclopedia. The articles are copyrighted under Creative Commons, and Wikia no more owns Uncyclopedia than do any of the editors. Any site that hosts Uncyclopedia articles is Uncyclopedia. It is accurate to say that the wiki forked; it is inaccurate to say that either "tine" of the fork is official in any capacity.

KarakasaObake (talk) 21:32, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

By the way, Otterathome, it is not .no but .co, I have no idea why you are saying it is .no. And KarakasaObake do you consider it better or worse to include the now-deleted (by Otterathome) material on the fork? The current version is inconsistent as it says 'several URLs, see text' and includes an external link to en.uncyclopedia.co, but provides no explanation. We should settle on either removing all information about the fork or including a sensible explanation of it. Cathfolant (talk) 00:19, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
I think it would be useful to include one or two sentences saying that the English-language project forked in 2013. I think the sections that were being edit-warred over in January were badly excessive. In my opinion, the fork represents a significant but minor event in a nearly-dead project. It's worth mentioning. Briefly. No one wants or needs to read any discussion of restrictions and constraints and controversy. KarakasaObake (talk) 00:31, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
This article still isn't consistent, can someone fix it please? Cathfolant logged out 03:24, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
What do you find to be inconsistent? KarakasaObake (talk) 18:36, 14 March 2014 (UTC)
Infobox claims that there are several urls and directs the reader to see the text, and en.uncyclopedia.co is in the external links section, but there is no explanation of why there are 'several' urls or why this 'independent Uncyclopedia' suddenly popped out of nowhere. Cathfolant (talk) 22:20, 19 March 2014 (UTC)
It is not there because there is no independent sourcing for it (there is apparently not even independent sourcing for the move to Wikia). I think that none of that is notable and does not merit mentioning. --Dirk Beetstra T C 10:45, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Find third party source to show notable spin off

Stop adding content about the spinoff until third-party coverage is found. If this continues, this page will likely be fully protected, and the uncyclopedia.co link being added to the WP:BLACKLIST.--Otterathome (talk) 07:48, 3 March 2014 (UTC)

Per WP:N, notability applies to the article, not the content. Weight may be given to content according to coverage, but though very little about Uncyclopedia has been covered in reliable sources at all for years now, that doesn't mean the article shouldn't be kept up to date. -— Isarra 18:34, 3 March 2014 (UTC)
In relationship to notability - the site uncyclopedia.org/Uncyclopedia.wikia.com has been referenced in several publications in the past, and as such meets notability criterion. The site at uncyclopedia.co is a significant aspect of the history of that site. While I am in agreement that the independently hosted site may not - at this stage - merit an article of its own accord, it is significant in relationship to this page. (In the same way the child of a celebrity may not be notable enough to merit an article of it's own, deleting the mention of the child from said celebrities article would be counter-productive.) PuppyOnTheRadio talk 21:55, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
The editors of this article including SPIKE have worked hard to keep the content fair, reliable and objective considering the lack of third party sources available. These squabbles are also a waste of all of our time. Having NO content about the fork does no one any good...especially wikipedia's readers. --Shabidoo | Talk 03:45, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
I agree with the two posts above that references to the Fork would be useful. I think it is useful to note that the Wikia site uses Wikipedia as a standard for whether a new article constitutes cyberbullying, and it would be useful to note that the Wikia site doesn't share usernames with the rest of Wikia. Famously, Wikipedia does not exist merely to hold useful information, and the issue raised was not utility but notability, on which the right answer is not as clear. Shabidoo, regarding wasting time, this article had reached a state of balance acceptable to all until young editors at the Fork began debating emergency measures that might be taken to goose their site traffic. To For others to debate by bringing me up on conflict-of-interest charges might be viewed as a time-waster too. Spike-from-NH (talk) 12:05,22:02 5 March 2014 (UTC)
Why would "not sharing usernames" be notable? The various projects are so incompatible that any attempt to take an article from the English-language version and repost it in Spanish or Polish would violate the author's copyright, as the licences don't match. As for Spike and COI, take a look at this user's edits on Wikia's version of Uncyclopedia. This is not an uninvolved editor; this is an admin over there who has come here to do some Wiki-PR. WP:COI anyone? K7L (talk) 05:31, 8 March 2014 (UTC)
I think everyone here has a conflict of interest to some degree, and Spike seems to be editing in good faith. In my opinion, anyone trying to remove all mention of the fact that Uncyclopedia is currently hosted at two sites is editing in bad faith; and anyone trying to steer traffic in a way that favors one site over the other is editing in bad faith. Spike is doing neither. As far as I know, there are no fully disinterested Wikipedians editing this article who have not spent a significant amount of time editing Uncyclopedia, because nobody else cares about Uncyclopedia. KarakasaObake (talk) 22:33, 11 March 2014 (UTC)
There are. The information is not notable - you can not provide reliable, independent references that show that either of the sites is representing Uncyclopedia or whether either of them are (still) notable. The past before Wikia is notable, after that is questionable as no-one outside of the editors of Uncyclopedia cared. --Dirk Beetstra T C 10:48, 24 March 2014 (UTC)

Uncyclopedia in other languages - german??

I am wondering about, that there are two german competitors (Kamelopedia and Stupipedia) mentioned but NOT the german Uncyclopedia (http://de.uncyclopedia.org). How that? --87.144.216.123 (talk) 10:06, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Proposed explanation of the fork

There seems to be some consensus (and some disagreement) that there should be at least a sentence or two on the fork, and the infobox still directs the reader to see something that isn't there rather than explaining the situation properly, but I won't change it myself for obvious reasons, so here is some text I think may be suitable:

On 5 January 2013, several users set up an independently hosted fork of Uncyclopedia at en.uncyclopedia.co, stating their reasons for doing so in a 'press release'.[2] As of 19 March 2014, this fork has 29,389 articles.[3]
  1. ^ Template:Pagecount
  2. ^ "Uncyclopedia:Press release - move from Wikia". Uncyclopedia. 4 January 2013. Retrieved 19 March 2014.
  3. ^ "Special:Statistics". Uncyclopedia. Retrieved 19 March 2014.

Is this acceptable? I've tried to include only the verifiable/obvious facts here and avoid going into details that may or may not consist of advocacy. I believe those pages to be a reliable enough source for the fork and the # of articles, as the former has been protected and hence is not your average open wiki page and the latter is an uneditable special page, and (though this may fall under WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS or something similar) I notice that the article WikiWikiWeb uses pages on WikiWikiWeb, an open wiki, to source some of its information, and I'm in doubt as to whether protection exists there, so using an (otherwise) open wiki as a source does not seem to be totally out of the question.

Thoughts anyone? I won't go in and edit the page unless you say I should, don't worry - in fact I'm not sure I should be involved in this at all and this may be the last comment I make here, but the inconsistency I've described has been bothering me and I'd like to see an end put to it. If you don't want to include any text on the fork, I also think it would be best if the web address field on the infobox were changed to http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com and the en.uncyclopedia.co link removed from the external links. Cathfolant (talk) 22:55, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

I again ask for the obvious: why is this notable? No independent source has independently published about it (there are some quite independent sources that have published information, but the authors were not independent). That they moved to Wikia is already hardly noticed in outside, independent, media, and the article already relies on many primary sources. --Dirk Beetstra T C 06:00, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Cathfolant, a notorious editor at the Fork who recently helped pay its server fees, wants the Wikipedia article to link to the Fork, and preferably also to link to the Forkers' 95 Theses against Wikia, Inc. issued last year, a strategy she has also pursued by changing links on a variety of Wikia websites. She is here to get the article to tell her story. My edits, in contrast, did not spin the article in favor of the Wikia website. Placing me on the conflict-of-interest noticeboard was a tactical use of Wikipedia by people whose selectivity shows an equally strong bias. Spike-from-NH (talk)
No, I really meant 'to' - per the fourth paragraph in older version of this page, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uncyclopedia&oldid=592181284 - "The original Uncyclopedia, at uncyclopedia.org, was later purchased by Wikia and ported to a subdomain of wikia.com, where it is hosted by Wikia, Inc.[citation needed]", the sentence has since been removed as no independent reports show that that was notable. --Dirk Beetstra T C 12:03, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
SPIKE, Cathfolant doesn't deserve to be treated like this. Cathfolant...the editors know about the fork and its history and they've made their decision. All uncyclopedians...let's not disrupt the editors anymore and let's leave them do their work. --Shabidoo | Talk 16:56, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
Let's be clear about something. There is no website called "The Fork." Uncyclopedia is a collection of Creative Commons articles. Specifically because of that copyright structure, nobody owns anything called "Uncyclopedia." Wikia owns a domain called uncyclopedia.wikia.com, and some individuals own a domain called en.uncyclopedia.co, and I-don't-know-who owns a domain called mirror.uncyc.org. All of these domains link to servers that contain Uncyclopedia. These domain names are neither notable nor non-notable; they simply point to content. The domain that ends in .wikia.com is no more or less notable than the domain that ends in .uncyclopedia.co. To make an analogy, a building may be notable; its mailing address almost never is. KarakasaObake (talk) 22:52, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

In response to those who are questioning the notability of the fork or my intentions in this discussion, you have missed the point of what I said. I am trying to address the fact that the article in its current state directs the reader to an explanation that is not there, and I am asking either for there to be an explanation or for the 'see text' text and the en.uncyclopedia.co link in external links to be removed in favour of mentioning only the definitely notable uncyclopedia.wikia.com rather than what I believe is confusing to the reader. Beetstra and Spike-from-NH seem to have read the first part of what I said and skipped my proposed alternative before jumping into a reply. Cathfolant (talk) 04:43, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

@Shabidoo: the current state of the article was not 'decided on'. Otterathome removed the material on the fork while neglecting to address the fact that the text of the infobox referred to it. There was nothing more to it than that. Cathfolant (talk) 04:47, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Finally, @Spike-from-NH: I included what I believe you are referring to as 'the Forkers' 95 Theses against Wikia' only as a reference to support the existence of the fork, as it is the only source I know of and sourcing for this was disputed so I saw fit to point out a source, and if it isn't an acceptable source I have no problem with not using it, but referring to it as you do is simply not necessary. @KarakasaObake: I don't agree with that interpretation of the situation, as these sites may all be called 'Uncyclopedia' but they are most certainly not the same site and notability is not inherited, and I believe we are discussing the notability of the sites here as that is what is attached to the domain names. Furthermore, if it is suitable to include different domain names but not details of how they came to pass, we may as well just include the urls right in the infobox rather than waving our hands and saying 'See text'; though as I have said I believe this approach to be confusing to the reader as there is no explanation of how/why there are different domains. I welcome comments on which approach is best but statements to the effect that 'there is no fork' or details of what exactly I do on the 'fork' do nothing to address this. Cathfolant (talk) 05:05, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Cathfolant, you say the sites are not the same site, but there is a large body of content that the sites as they now exist still share, although the contents of each site has forked, adding material and subtracting material from one, and adding different material and subtracting different material from the other. The body of content that both sites still share is licensed on a CC-by-SA license, meaning that neither site can claim to own it, nor be the exclusive provider of such content. Moreover, the name "Uncyclopedia" is neither trademarked nor copyrighted, so neither site can claim to own that either, nor even the potato logo. As someone who is for inclusion over notability, I would prefer that the site's entire history including both sites be included, but if I take the devil's advocate position and argue the reverse, it could be argued that only the history that can be backed up in the press be included, which stops the clock before the split, and includes Wikia only to the extent to which it is mentioned in the press in connection to Uncyclopedia. I think there is precedent in Wikipedia policy that a site can be a source of information about itself, but should not be relied upon for the basis of the article's existence. Also, similar articles about internet sites do indeed link to the site itself, without said links being challenged. When it comes to links within articles, it would seem to me they are an important piece of information, provided that they are not presented in a promotional nor disparaging manner. Userafw (talk) 10:06, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Yes I suppose that's true. (Relevant policy is here btw; you seem to understand it well enough but thought I'd provide a link.) It seems what this all boils down to is just how notable material has to be before it can be included here, and what determines that notability - i.e. what sources we will accept and how far we are willing to go before we consider ourselves to have wandered into original research land. So...let's see.
There is a point I didn't think to mention in my analogy with WikiWikiWeb, which is that Uncyclopedia is primarily an encyclopedia of misinformation ('content-free') whereas WikiWikiWeb is more a collection of ideas, iirc. The page I provided as a source for the fork's existence is a project page, and while these have a higher likelihood than mainspace pages of containing at least an attempt at true information, many of them still are not serious. Assuming all this can be verified to our satisfaction, WikiWikiWeb could be considered a better self-published source than Uncyclopedia; on the other hand, assuming either it can't be verified or the distinctions between serious and non-serious pages are considered sufficiently verifiable, that Uncyclopedia page could potentially be used as a source. Considering the fact that the policy subsection I linked states that 'Self-published or questionable sources may be used as sources of information about themselves, especially in articles about themselves', I'm inclined to go with the latter, as Uncyclopedia would fall under 'questionable'. The question then is if any of the 5 criteria named there apply, which I believe there is some disagreement on. I would say that the page is acceptable enough and directly supports the existence and creation of the fork, but that's just me. I think I'd also leave out what I said in my proposed text about how the press release stated the reasons for forking, as that's not necessarily relevant, though I mainly pointed that out because there was some argument over how notable the reasons for forking were, I think.
Another site that forked, a possible basis for comparison, is WoWWiki. The existence of Wowpedia does appear to be backed up in the press, and as such it is acceptable to include material on it in the article, even going so far as to include a separate infobox on it. Uncyclopedia's forking, however, has not had such coverage, so it is not immediately clear from that if it should be included here unless we decide that Uncyclopedia itself is a reliable source in this context - which brings us back to the previous point.
As for whether the sites are the same or the fork is a fork, two things. uncyclopedia.co and uncyclopedia.wikia.com clearly share a good deal of content to anyone who looks at them, but if this is to be a deciding factor in the content of this article we should decide how essential it is that it be verifiable - because, at least I think, it isn't really, and saying so basically constitutes original research. No source says that the content is the same and whatnot - well, except for that press release page, which I think is the closest we've got for a source for any of this. Which all leads back to the question of whether it's acceptable.
A final point we may want to consider is WP:IAR: 'If a rule prevents you from improving the encyclopedia, ignore it.' The challenge here is determining what constitutes improving the encyclopedia, then. As I understand it Wikipedia exists to provide information that people are likely to find interesting or useful, and notability is a method of determining what is interesting or useful. If, then, something may not exactly be notable but could be interesting or useful to readers, could it by that logic be suitable for inclusion? I fear I am going nowhere particularly useful with this, but I believe the forking is of interest to readers, and as such we should at least consider the possibility that this could be a criterion for including it. That is of course just my opinion and I am open to others. Cathfolant (talk) 22:03, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Er, forget that last bit, only realised how stupid it was after I'd saved it. Bother. Cathfolant (talk) 22:08, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
I think our problem is that we're looking at uncyclopedia.wikia.com and en.uncyclopedia.co as two "websites," each of which claim to be Uncyclopedia. Uncyclopedia is not a website. Uncyclopedia is a collection of articles - of Creative Commons articles that nobody owns. Any website can host them. Uncyclopedia.wikia.com has the legal right to host articles written and posted to en.uncyclopedia.co, and vice versa. And the hosts themselves simply aren't notable or even the point. We're seriously sitting here fighting over whether a URL is notable enough compared to another URL?? It's just an address!! KarakasaObake (talk) 22:32, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
That's another way of looking at it. The main point bothering me about such an approach is how the article should be written if we are to write it as if uncyclopedia.co and uncyclopedia.wikia.com are just two different names for the same thing. How does one refer to the two websites in relation to each other? Or is this not necessary, do you think? Should we only have the two urls, and say that they both point to 'Uncyclopedia'? What I worry is that this will not make any sense and that if we try to explain it in any sensible way it won't be quite right, and that we simply can't explain it without resorting to calling the fork a fork. And if we don't explain it - well, infoboxes are (I think) supposed to be a sort of summary of the article, rather like the lead section, and at least as the article stands now, it is summarising things that aren't in the article anywhere. That was the main problem I initially wanted to address and I'm unsure as to whether including en.uncyclopedia.co as just 'another url' will have the same effect.
We may also have to decide which url should be used where or come first; deciding this is why there should be at least some evidence that one is more notable than the other. It seems to have been settled on that the references to policies and such should be to uncyclopedia.wikia.com as that is the 'primary' url. On the other hand, TV Tropes' article on Uncyclopedia - which may just qualify as some kind of source even though it is a LoginToEdit wiki and may have been edited by Uncyclopedia editors - appears to treat en.uncyclopedia.co as the primary url while mentioning that Uncyclopedia is 'available in two places', and the Babel page (uncyclopedia.info) that lists the different Uncyclopedias and is referenced in the external links for this article refers only to en.uncyclopedia.co, and many of the foreign-language Uncyclopedias' interwiki links point to en.uncyclopedia.co as K7L has noted. Example. WikiIndex's entry on Uncyclopedia may also be of interest though that is an open wiki page that has been edited by several fork editors. This appears to me to suggest that en.uncyclopedia.co considered purely as a domain name may in some sense take precedence over uncyclopedia.wikia.com, especially as it has been noted earlier that the fact of Uncyclopedia's being hosted on Wikia is not notable and has not had much coverage.
What I think is that since there are two separate websites called Uncyclopedia, it makes more sense to me to treat them as such and to put more emphasis on the one that is definitely notable. However we may want to reconsider exactly what this article is about - if the details of hosting are truly not notable, and this article is simply about 'Uncyclopedia', perhaps the notability of the different Uncyclopedias in relation to each other is moot... Cathfolant (talk) 23:18, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
The fact that TV Tropes, in its description of memes that first appeared at one URL, lists another URL first, clearly reflects editing by the Forkers. And in citing the fact that cy.uncyclopedia.org.uk's interwiki favors the Fork, Cathfolant is certainly pointing to work of her own as "independent" proof. Indeed, the Forkers have used interwikis as a battleground in the fight for notability, as they have used this article as a battleground. Spike-from-NH (talk) 01:54, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

Please, show us independent reliable sources talking about the split/fork/copy or whatever of the move of a part of the editors from the Wikia to another place. And while you are at it, please show also independent reliable sources talking about the takeover by Wikia. I already question even that fact's notability - and if it is not notable, it does not have a place in this article. --Dirk Beetstra T C 05:54, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

Indeed, you've identified the problem. There is no independent source saying that Uncyclopedia is hosted at uncyclopedia.wikia.com. There is no independent source saying that Uncyclopedia is hosted at en.uncyclopedia.co. There is no indepedent source saying Uncyclopedia is hosted at uncyclopedia.org. There is no independent source saying that Uncyclopedia is hosted at mirror.uncyc.org. There are sources that include links to all these sites, sure, but links are not assertions and they are not facts. And the real truth is: Uncyclopedia is not hosted in any one particular place. Uncyclopedia is a collection of Creative Commons articles, not a website. So then the question becomes: how do we address that problem? It would be totally inappropriate to talk about the drama involved in Wikia's hosting or en.uncyclopedia.co's re-hosting. But is it inappropriate to simply mention that different versions of Uncyclopedia exist in at least two places? I think that's necessary information and, if nothing else, should be included per WP:IAR. KarakasaObake (talk) 18:25, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Good, we agree. So why do we list them as official sites? If something does not have an official website (or websites), then they should not be listed at all. --Dirk Beetstra T C 08:42, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
Hm, hadn't thought of that. That's another option. Could just take out all mention of urls, then...but then I suppose maybe we'd have to refrain from sourcing anything directly to uncyclopedia, though I'm not sure how solid the arguments are for that but doing so would constitute some sort of endorsement of one url over the other...something to think about, definitely.
As for sourcing, I'm afraid I've given you all I've been able to find so far. I may do some more digging though and will let you know if I run across anything sensible looking. (And just to clarify matters, I haven't presented any of my own work here.) Cathfolant (talk) 18:40, 26 March 2014 (UTC)
Lets face that as well - it is fine to have primary sources or sources on typically unreliable sites (wikis), but I do find it worrisome that of the first 19 references in the article currently 16 references are on wikis (note that the 2 references to The Hindu are essentially the same, except reformatting and another image; so 16 out of 18 is a better number). Now, those sources to the Hindu (three of them) - the first one (a1) is not a full attribution (it talks about the potato, not the hollow potato), the second one is absolutely not attributable to The Hindu (the two nicks are NOT mentioned in the article), and the third one is also skewed (the The Hindu article says that most articles start with one specific quote of Oscar Wilde, not that they are invention of quotes attributed to Oscar Wilde). And the real fun is yet to start - the version of 10 October 2006) already states the information published in the 10 October 2006 article in The Hindu - I wonder where the writer of the The Hindu article got their information. And the other reference (from .net) - for me it redirects to another page and I do not see any information on Uncyclopedia (maybe someone can find me an archived version?). Thin. Very thin. --Dirk Beetstra T C 11:13, 27 March 2014 (UTC)
Hm, not good. Fwiw I've copied the article to my sandbox and deleted all the info sourced to either wikis or nowhere, I think, though there may be more as I haven't checked the sources carefully. I noticed as I was doing that that a lot of the statements sourced to wikis didn't seem to be 'sourced' at all but were really original research. This definitely needs some cleanup though I'm obviously not going to tackle it myself. I did notice however that there are still about 42 sources that aren't wikis, which means this probably shouldn't go to afd as I thought perhaps it might. Cathfolant (talk) 20:57, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
From the Sandbox, I've cut out more (peacock parts ('Oh look, the New York Times has used information from one of our articles!'), the TheHindu reference which is circular and the .net that does not work). There is now one section below that is heavily referenced and there should be enough there to give notability, maybe some of the references are suitable to be used in the lede on a new sentence. --Dirk Beetstra T C 06:01, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the help - do you think the infobox should have stayed, or is that just too full of non-notable information as well? What about the external links? You seem to think uncyclopedia.wikia.com is superior to en.uncyclopedia.co and therefore should be the only url included, but I thought you also said there wasn't proof that the hosting of uncyclopedia is notable any which way, so I'm not sure what we should do about this. Cathfolant (talk) 04:20, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
An infobox is generally good, but pruned to the notable I guess. And I don't think the wikia is superior, but the original Uncyclopedia was by the 'owner' transferred from the original official site to Wikia (and the notability of that move is already questionable, no-one independent outside of the Uncyclopedia-community seemed to care; what happened after that .. even less). WP:ELOFFICIAL gives a WP:IAR on WP:EL/WP:ELNO - but what is now recognised as the official site, if there is none then maybe we should not list any? But as for all external links, the onus is on the editor who wishes to add it - not just add it. Have that discussion here, let it run, get consensus and then add it. No consensus - no addition, consensus shows that only one of the two reasonable - have only one, consensus shows that both are official - have both. Editors over and over question these links, but they stay despite that. --Dirk Beetstra T C 06:17, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Connected contributors

I added Cathfolant alongside me as a {{Connected contributor}} at the top of this page. She reverted me, commenting: you are full of it on that, I have hardly contributed anything other than relatively minor changes. Apart from a complete rewrite in her sandbox, she does indeed rely on other people (often anonymous) to apply edits, so she and her confederates can save their ammo to protest that a revert is "controversial." The key term, though, is not "contributor" but "connected"; again, Cathfolant is a financial contributor to the Fork site and, like her pals, the sole point of her involvement in this article is to attract traffic to that site at the expense of the other site. The silence about this, compared to the recent reporting of me, is remarkable. She has also changed the parameters of the archive 'bot for this page, citing an unknowable conversation on IRC. I reverted that too, and the unaffiliated editors on this page should review it. Spike-from-NH (talk) 12:03, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

No.
My only reason for being involved in this, at this point, is to try to improve the article. I noticed an issue with the infobox and attempted to discuss it here, which did not ultimately result in it being fixed so I went in and made a relatively small change myself to direct the reader to the external links which are where the supposed two URLs are in fact noted. Whether my change has remained, I neither know nor care. I also was made aware by Beetstra that much of the content was sourced to wikis, and as he seemed to think it should not be I decided to find out what the article would look like without it (which I wouldn't consider a complete rewrite, but whatever), and also discovered that a good deal of the wiki-sourced content seemed to be original research. My reason for not making more than two fairly small edits myself to this article should be obvious - I am heavily involved in Uncyclopedia and as such my edits might be affected by a bias, and so I try to get the approval of others; and if they do not approve, so be it, I will accept that I was wrong. I originally came here because of the discussion on Uncyclopedia, I admit, but after that my intentions were not linked to my involvement with Uncyclopedia any more than I could help it.
I am sure this, too, will fall on deaf ears for Spike; everything else I have said has: he has seemingly responded to what I do on uncyclopedia, essentially who I am, rather than the points I have made, and he is doing so again here. But in any case, I will ping Σ now as I talked with him on irc and I expect he would agree on-wiki as well that the archiving needs to be fixed. Spike may not even be aware that it is broken, but of course, since it was I who tried to fix it, that must mean I was wrong to do so. Cathfolant (talk) 20:24, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
P.S. I have again removed the claim that I am a connected contributor. Connected I may be, but I am not acting as Spike would suggest and I believe that to say so can never be more than an opinion. Cathfolant (talk) 20:29, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
Reverted. "I am heavily involved in Uncyclopedia....I have again removed the claim that I am a connected contributor. Connected I may be, but" her intentions are pure, though she notes they were otherwise originally, but in any case I cannot be sure of them, though she can be sure of mine. Ergo, {{Connected contributor}}, at least as much as I, and financially to boot. Spike-from-NH (talk) 23:27, 10 April 2014 (UTC)
Hello...I am not a contributor, what is so hard to understand about that? But I am getting tired of this. I would have liked for there to be a clear-headed, conclusive discussion of what should be included in the article and why, and couldn't care less at this point if the article consisted entirely of WIKIA IS THE BEST or some such, but still I keep coming up against all this stuff directed specifically at what I am rather than what I have said. This is going nowhere at a zillion miles an hour. Cathfolant (talk) 04:03, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
Cathfollant...I don't think anything more need be said. Let SPIKE have the last word and get on with the article. --Shabidoo | Talk 04:29, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
Not sure what you mean by that...
In any case I see that some more unsourced content got added. [10] Now what? Cathfolant (talk) 04:54, 11 April 2014 (UTC)
Virtually moderating this conversation and rewriting the article in your sandbox means you are a contributor, even if you induce others or Anon to apply the actual edits. But you again reverted {{Connected contributor}}, with summary I've explained why I'm not a contributor and I also don't intend to come back and edit this or even try to discuss anything, I just want out now, a call for pity rivaling the "final" Nixon press conference. Do not go to WP:3RR and do not seek the stealth here that you have used in your campaign on other websites. Spike-from-NH (talk) 20:21, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

I've taken this here, for the benefit of anyone else who's been following things. Cathfolant (talk) 03:25, 17 April 2014 (UTC)

(talk page stalker) I hate expiring links. Archive836 is where it's at. Meteor_sandwich_yum (talk) 01:25, 26 April 2014 (UTC)

Reasons Uncyclopedia: The Content-Free Encyclopedia Is Better Than Wikipedia

It is better. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.129.114.176 (talkcontribs)

Proposed Solution

For all the links have BOTH sites' versions.I.e.: for Wikipedia, Wikia Independent so that there doesn't have to be an eternal flamewar. --The Defender of Light Grand Warlock Danzathel Aetherwing >Inventory< 02:39, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

The 'eternal flamewar' is easily solved by edit protection and/or liberally handed out blocks. If one writes a statement using cnn.com as a reference, then one puts cnn.com as a reference. If one finds evidence supporting a statement on cnn.com, then one adds cnn.com as a reference. Changes of those references to another site who is also supporting the material is bad practice. Edit warring over that is even worse practice. All those are against our policies. Adding a second reference that is stating practically, essentially or completely the same is simply superfluous (some things have been covered by every major and minor news outlet in the world, we do not put references to all of those, just the ones that .. were used to write the information). In short: I don't see the need to change the references, what needs to change here is the behaviour of some of the editors active on these pages. --Dirk Beetstra T C 06:24, 28 October 2014 (UTC)
Indeed. Besides, neither site is a reliable source, and the fork is not notable. Furthermore, I see no flamewar whatsoever, aside from forkers occasionally popping in and saying we ought to change things--and that is a one-sided flamewar, if at all. -– Cathfolant (talk) 01:00, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
DungeonSiegeAddict...this is unnecessary. The article isn't here to make the editors from the wikia site or the .co site happy. The article is here to inform the general reader about uncyclopedia rendered through wikipedia policy. The sources that we choose to cite is based on due weight and not on spoon/fork squabbling.
Cathfolant, in April your comments were critical of the spoon. Now you use the same hostile language about the fork. Allegiances should be dropped when editing content on wikipedia and leaving snarky comments here does nothing to help improve the wikipedia article. --Shabidoo | Talk 01:42, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
Hey, I'm basically just repeating what Spike has already said a jillion times; didn't see you object to him saying it. I only said it to point out why there wasn't a flamewar, not in the interest of my 'allegiances'. Separately, the same goes for you. -– Cathfolant (talk) 06:43, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
No. SPIKE never claimed that the fork was not notable, a comment like that reeks of COI. SPIKE's edits and comments on wikipedia regarding uncyclopedia have been totally neutral, constructive and has followed wikipedia policy. --Shabidoo | Talk 19:39, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
In fact, I was open to that claim. If one acquires the same merchandise as Joe's Tavern and invites all its customers to one's basement instead, it might lack notability, depending on who takes up the offer, and certainly is not more notable than the original. The recent Greggs controversy happened at the original site, because Google links to the original site, and it does so not just because of our corporate connection but because we acted to eliminate the apparent libel, while the Fork would jive about its editors' rights. However, I agreed that this article should be neutral. (Newbie Thememeer has broken this, and I have asked him to undo his edit.) Spike-from-NH (talk) 16:23, 16 November 2014 (UTC) PS--Thememeer did not, nor did he do anything else on the website in the 5 days, so I have undone him. Spike-from-NH (talk) 00:06, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Bias

This article had been a compromise between those involved with the editing at uncyclopedia.wikia.com and uncyclopedia.co but now it has been changed to reflect the views of one side (those at co). It is also incorrect to suggest the site at Wikia is a 'fork' since that is the original site. Those running the co site copied the database to a new web host - and announced what they had done at uncyclopedia wikia in January 2013. The compromise reached in November 2014 seemed a fair way of describing the situation - two sites with the same name but at different locations with links for readers to judge for themselves. I don't see what has happened since to let editors ( a couple only registered in October 2015) to drastically change the article. --Gepid (talk) 09:09, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

Plus threaten me and bring me up on two Administrators' Noticeboards, so that I have been warned not to continue restoring the factual version of this article, plus also reporting DungeonSiegeAddict510 (a member of the other website) for doing the same thing. This coincides with nightly vandal sprees on the Wikia Uncyclopedia, such as tonight's contributions from brand new user "Wikipedia rollbackers" who mixed ads for the .co in with his vandalism. I do not claim that sudden new Wikipedian "Shalir Salim" is that vandal, but his animus against Wikia is clear and he has a continual record of disruptive contributions. I do believe that the perennial conversation on the .co site's IRC chat on how to reinvigorate Uncyclopedia has reverted to its occasional theme of damaging the Wikia site, with the implicit approval of the people who broke the project in half in the first place, and that the Wikipedia article is now being hacked as a transparent effort to divert traffic. Spike-from-NH (talk) 15:13, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

It was not a neutral compromise. The article was pro Wikia.com. The article is now neutral and mentions both sites. It should not be changed from its current form. I feel some topic bans are in order. PKHilliam (talk) 22:43, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

@Spike-from-NH You were not threatened. A warning for Edit Warring is not a threat. While I have edited Wikia referencing the backlash to site's community features I feel you are taking my edits out of context. I only reported you for the Edit Warring for which you recieved a Administrator Warning. I am not affiliated with either uncyclopedia.co or uncyclopedia.wikia.com and am a neutral party editing and social links as well as Uncyclopedia project links suggest that Uncyclopedia.co is the main site. Any vandalism at uncyclopedia.wikia.com advertising Uncyclopedia.co is unrelated and unfortunate.
I feel there is a major conflict of interest here given both Gepid and Spike-from-NH are Administration team at the Wikia branch of Uncyclopedia and unfortunately I think its for the best if both users do not edit the Uncyclopedia article anymore. I have made references to the Wikia branch on the page and I feel it works fair in its current state. S. Salim (talk) 01:20, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

Alright, let's get this straight. I am banned from UncycloWikia. I favored the fork for the most part too. IN ADDITION TO THAT, I am a rollbacker at the fork, afaik. Yet, even I think that the recent "improvements" are so obviously biased, it can be smelled from miles away. The two above accounts, less than a month old, are now suddenly representing themselves as the bearers of the truth. Lest anyone has forgotten, WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS is in effect. Yes, I disagree with many of Wikia's policies. Yes, I want the fork to succeed. However, let the fork succeed on its own merits, rather than gaming backlinks to boost search engine rankings. In addition, let's all remember WP:OWN. On what basis do the above two accounts suddenly say that only they can present their "truth", while others aren't allowed to do so? --DSA510 Pls No Bully 05:15, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

The assertion that Uncyclopedia.Co is now 'the main site' is based on what? Not on Google rankings or Alexa rankings. Nor here as regards the media when the Greggs bakery story and their altered logo was widely picked up by the press in August 2014.They referred to Uncyclopedia - not 'Uncyclopedia Wikia'. As I mentioned above, the situation we had arrived in October 2014 between both sides of the divide that there was now two uncyclopedias. This article clearly has now been hijacked to put across one view only. --Gepid (talk) 10:46, 4 November 2015 (UTC)

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What I've seen on there

This site while it does parody wiki it's self literally insulting stuff like Kung Fu Panda, Nin-Hao Kai-Lan, Breadwinners, Nickelodeon, and CN. They even got away with adding the infamous film by Michael Schelp, Spider's Web: A Pig's Tale. MechMaster Katzenstein (talk) 03:10, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 16 June 2018

I would like to add to the "Uncyclopedia in other languages" part, regarding Uncyclopedia in Israel: "Hebrew- Eincyclopedia translates to "Nocyclopedia" and pronounced just like encyclopedia. the hebrew page rose in the early days of the website on the 11th of december 2005[1], and ever since has been active and has to this date 2300 articles[2]. the style of comedy used in the eincyclopedia articles are rarely satirical like the english version, but rather use repeating inside jokes, such as Shabtai Tsvi being the god of all creation [3], Beni Goren being a demon[4] and so on. the humour on the website is usually very slapstick oriented and therefore not many adults find its contents funny. Alon Tevet (talk) 10:50, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

  Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. Sam Sailor 12:16, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

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. [11] 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: [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] 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)

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)

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 had no sources for its relation to the original. 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)

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)

Protected edit request on 28 May 2019

In Uncyclopedia#History, please replace:

The Uncyclopedia hosted on Fandom had been scheduled for deletion due to concerns by Fandom staff of offensive content<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-url=https://archive.today/20190228001321/http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-date=February 28, 2019|title=A message from Fandom|quote=... So we are looking again at Uncyc’s content, and have decided that it’s not the sort of thing that we want to host anymore.|publisher=Uncyclopedia (Wikia)|accessdate=February 27, 2019|dead-url=no|df=mdy-all}}</ref> and was closed as of May 14, 2019. A mirror site had previously been set up by members of this community prior to the Fandom site's closure.

with:

Wikia permanently closed the last of its Uncyclopedia-related wikis on May 14, 2019.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-url=https://archive.today/20190228001321/http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-date=February 28, 2019|title=A message from Fandom|quote=... So we are looking again at Uncyc’s content, and have decided that it’s not the sort of thing that we want to host anymore.|publisher=Uncyclopedia (Wikia)|accessdate=February 27, 2019|dead-url=yes|df=mdy-all}}</ref> The original English-language site was quickly relaunched as ''uncyclopedia.ca'', an independent wiki.<ref>[http://web.archive.org/web/20190512232714/http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:Uncyclopedia_is_moving Uncyclopedia is moving], uncyclopedia.wikia.com (archived), May 2019</ref>

That removes the term "mirror site", which is invalid in this context. As much as I'm disappointed to hear that stealth canvassing on the Uncyclopedia Discord chat was used to co-ordinate an edit war to remove all mention of uncyclopedia.ca across twenty Wikipedia languages and a couple of non-WMF projects (according to Supergeeky1's admission above), it would seem that the only way for this to be remotely close to WP:NPOV is to at least mention both sites. Q788771 (talk) 14:14, 28 May 2019 (UTC)

I think the following would be more neutral: Wikia permanently closed the last of its Uncyclopedia-related wikis on May 14, 2019.[1] After a vote to move to a separate wiki hosted by Uncyclomedia, it was decided the replacement wiki on Uncyclomedia was incomplete and unusable due to changes since 2014 in the names database on the Fandom-hosted wiki that prevented users from logging in to the replacement wiki on Uncyclomedia. The original English-language site was then quickly relaunched as uncyclopedia.ca, an independent wiki.[2] Userafw (talk) 13:49, 3 June 2019 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ "A message from Fandom". Uncyclopedia (Wikia). Archived from the original on February 28, 2019. Retrieved February 27, 2019. ... So we are looking again at Uncyc's content, and have decided that it's not the sort of thing that we want to host anymore. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |dead-url= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ Uncyclopedia is moving, uncyclopedia.wikia.com (archived), May 2019
  Not done: please establish a consensus for this alteration before using the {{edit protected}} template. please continue discussing and reopen request when you have general agreement — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 15:58, 3 June 2019 (UTC)
Is it safe to say that there is consensus to add "As Wikia permanently closed the last of its Uncyclopedia-related wikis on May 14, 2019 the original English-language site was relaunched as uncyclopedia.ca, an independent project." while leaving the decision of whether to mention "Uncyclomedia" (who are they?) and "changes since 2014 in the names database on the Fandom-hosted wiki" (do we know that that's what caused the problem and, if so, from what reliable sources?) until later? A "replacement wiki" that was never usable might not be encyclopaedia-worthy enough to justify mention. The only important point in this mess is that the community has been splintered into two sites (en.uncyclopedia.co and uncyclopedia.ca), so a neutral article must cite sources to indicate that both still exist. What's there now omits one of the two sites entirely. Q788771 (talk) 15:13, 4 June 2019 (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:

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

http://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 [19], [20], [21] 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)

Read 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)

Yes, I destroyed it. TheRealWikiJan (talk) 01:31, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

I vandalized it! TheRealWikiJan (talk) 01:32, 12 June 2019 (UTC)

History

Wikia Uncyclopedia is closed. Can an administrator please do something about the references or Fandom MediaWiki in the History section?

The Wikia site is part of Uncyclopedia's history, so the mentions of it should stay. Clarinetguy097 (talk) 23:51, 7 July 2019 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 25 July 2019

Please revert [[22]]. CLCStudent (talk) 18:19, 25 July 2019 (UTC) CLCStudent (talk) 18:19, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

This attempt to promote a different URL is rather childish. You don't get to single handedly fork an established community and suddenly you're the real deal now. --Charitwo (talk) (contribs) 18:25, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Worth mentioning that uncyclopedia: interwiki link points to the proper place as well. --Charitwo (talk) (contribs) 19:33, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Zombiebaron and Kevindongyt are paid employees of an unauthorized Uncyclopedia fork trying to promote their website. The original wiki is at uncyclopedia.ca. Bailes2700 (talk) 18:31, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
This is completely false. Uncyclopedia is a volunteer project and nobody is paid for their contributions. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 18:36, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
  Not done for now: This is probably one of the dumbest edit wars I've ever seen. @Bailes2700, Charitwo, BFDIBebble, Kevindongyt, CLCStudent, Kevindongyt, and Zombiebaron:. Also if I see this continue once the protection expires, I will block anyone involved for edit warring going forward. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:32, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
This is an edit war orchestrated by members of the fork who want to keep the entire franchise for themselves. Forks and mirrors are not notable and should not be covered on Wikipedia. Our site moved from Wikia to an independent domain and warrants coverage. This fork does not and their attempts to doctor evidence should make this clear. BFDIBebble (talk) 18:35, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
BFDIBebble, I know nothing about Uncyclopedia, so I have no idea what is what. Like I said, figure it out, or take it WP:3O, or WP:ANI for further input. —CYBERPOWER (Chat) 18:42, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Yes I believe we will be taking this matter to arbitration, thanks for your assistance Cyberpower678. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 18:43, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
There is no need for arbitration. What is required is actions against the edit warrers who have come back today to continue to try and push their unnotable fork in order to boost its search rankings through Wikipedia backlinks. I have reported one today at AIV and will continue to report them if the need arises. BFDIBebble (talk) 19:02, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Are you sure it's not the .ca editors like yourself trying to remove .co links which have been there for years and thereby boost the .ca site's SEO ranking? Because that's exactly what you are doing, and it makes perfect sense of your "Take your fork and stick it." edit summary. --emc (t a l k) 19:22, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
The site on Wikia received extensive media coverage after the .co fork was created. This proves to me that what was formerly hosted by Wikia is the main site and is therefore more notable. Forks and mirrors are not noteworthy. Wikia site moves to .ca which is still the main site. I did not make that edit summary and I would appreciate if you retracted that statement. BFDIBebble (talk) 19:26, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
A CU might convince me to retract it, but probably not. Can you point me to the policy that says forks are not notable? Because up until you and other editors at the .ca site decided to start removing .co links to boost your own site, there was no issue linking to both the Fandom site (now .ca) and the fork. What you're doing is very, very obvious. --emc (t a l k) 19:34, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Compromise

In order to avoid any more bloodshed, I have created Uncyclopaedia which is specifically about the REAL .ca site. BFDIBebble (talk) 19:35, 25 July 2019 (UTC)

Aaaaaand it's gone. How about just linking to .ca and .co within the article. You know, like someone without an obvious agenda would do for impartiality's sake? --emc (t a l k) 19:43, 25 July 2019 (UTC)
Yes, neutrality between the two websites is a consensus we reached a couple years ago (look at the archives). Now, what used to be at Wikia is at uncyclopedia.ca, and is nowhere else online, though there may be copies on a few thumb drives. This article should give both URLs and, where it must cite the subject itself, should not favor one to the exclusion of the other. Recently, members of the Fork began a PR campaign asserting that there has been nothing on Wikia (except a "mirror of the Fork") ever since the creation of the Fork, spilling over to this article and talk page. This is self-serving and untrue. Spike-from-NH (talk) 02:49, 28 July 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca

Protected edit request on July 29, 2019

In Uncyclopedia#History, please replace:

The Uncyclopedia hosted on Fandom had been scheduled for deletion due to concerns by Fandom staff of offensive content<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-url=https://archive.today/20190228001321/http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-date=February 28, 2019|title=A message from Fandom|quote=... So we are looking again at Uncyc’s content, and have decided that it’s not the sort of thing that we want to host anymore.|publisher=Uncyclopedia (Wikia)|accessdate=February 27, 2019|dead-url=no|df=mdy-all}}</ref> and was closed as of May 14, 2019. A mirror site had previously been set up by members of this community prior to the Fandom site's closure.

with:

Wikia permanently closed the last of its Uncyclopedia-related wikis on May 14, 2019.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-url=https://archive.today/20190228001321/http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:A_message_from_Fandom|archive-date=February 28, 2019|title=A message from Fandom|quote=... So we are looking again at Uncyc’s content, and have decided that it’s not the sort of thing that we want to host anymore.|publisher=Uncyclopedia (Wikia)|accessdate=February 27, 2019|dead-url=yes|df=mdy-all}}</ref> The former Wikia English-language site was quickly relaunched as ''uncyclopedia.ca'', an independent wiki.<ref>[http://web.archive.org/web/20190512232714/http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Forum:Uncyclopedia_is_moving Uncyclopedia is moving], uncyclopedia.wikia.com (archived), May 2019</ref>

This allows neutrality on both sides as it mentions .ca whilst leaving in the information about .co. --BFDIBebble (talk) 22:05, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

  Not done for now. Please secure and demonstrate consensus for the change first and then reactivate the request by removing "answered=yes" or filing a new request once the wording is decided. I suggest bringing the above RFC to a conclusion would be a good start. (Uninvolved neutral admin; I take no stance on merits or otherwise of the proposed change; and I intend to stay that way so no pings please. If consensus cannot be found you may want to take User:cyberpower678's advice.) --kingboyk (talk) 01:38, 31 July 2019 (UTC)
The proposed wording is factual and is an improvement over the existing text. But "bringing the above RFC to a conclusion" is a non sequitur; the proposed wording does not purge mention of the Fork, as the RFC proposes. The RFC is an extreme position that is unlikely to get consensus. The proposed wording does not go far enough; the Infobox and Intro still suggest that there is a single website and that it is the Fork, supporting the Forkers' position that no creative effort occurred anywhere else since they left. Spike-from-NH (talk) 12:26, 31 July 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca

Establishing consensus

It is time to vote on the following question: Is the fork (uncyclopedia.co) noteworthy and therefore worthy of coverage?

Vote below:


  • Against The fork is unauthorized and illegitimate. Uncyclopedia.ca is the only real Uncyclopedia. If you cover the fork then you will cover any mirrors of Wikipedia. The meatpuppets being operated by the fork are in bad faith. BFDIBebble (talk) 21:51, 27 July 2019 (UTC)
  • For Both uncyclopedia.co and uncyclopedia.ca have their own notability. The original site at .org was purchased by Wikia, and a subset of the community moved to .co a number of years ago, while a different subset remained at .wikia.com. When Wikia recently opted to no longer host the site, those that were previously at the wikia hosted site created a new site (.ca). Both sites can be traced back to the original site, and the developing community. Part of the notability of the site, and the more recent example, traces back to the Greggs logo incident, which relates directly back to the site located at Wikia, and happened post the creation of Uncyclopedia.co. Both locations include Uncyclopedia content, have active membership, and have a common root. Both sites have their own claim to notability. While there has been some divergence, the bulk of the content remains the same, and both should be equally represented here. PuppyOnTheRadio talk 02:03, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
    I agree, this is the only sensible solution. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 05:35, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
  • Abstain. Puppy's recap above is correct. (The split occurred in January 2013.) News articles such as the Greggs incident show the notability of the Wikia website now at uncyclopedia.ca. I do not know of third-party coverage of uncyclopedia.co that would establish notability, and have given the example of patrons of Sparky's Pub who become dissatisfied with the owner and start meeting to drink in someone's basement; it does not thereby become Sparky's, and certainly Sparky's itself does not cease being Sparky's. I have never been comfortable with the "community" rhetoric used to measure where Uncyclopedia went, because it requires individuals to assume the role of the voice of the "community."
    However, as stated in the previous section, I am happy to have the article revert to a balanced treatment of both websites, and therefore do not agree that "it is time to vote" on purging mention of the Fork.
    Wikipedia Admins should note that this discussion has featured false-flag posts designed to impersonate and develop antipathy for persons at the opposite website, such as in the history of User talk:Beetstra.
    Nominator asserts that the Fork is "unauthorized and illegitimate"—but, especially given our Copyleft agreement, you hardly need authorization to fork the wiki. Spike-from-NH (talk) 03:11, 28 July 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca
    PS—Of all the people in this debate defending uncyclopedia.ca, I know none of them except PuppyOnTheRadio. Kevindongyt said (there, and confirming for me on his talk page here) that the account created in that name on uncyclopedia.ca is an impostor. Corarave was created on uncyclopedia.ca yesterday. I suspect that the Fork has acquired enemies at some troll site and they are attacking it by attributing to us an extreme position (that the article should be purged of references to .co) that is not ours. Again, I would revert the portion of this article describing English Uncyclopedia to the balance we agreed on a couple years ago; the only news since then being the change of URL of the Wikia site to .ca. Spike-from-NH (talk) 14:16, 28 July 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca
  • Against. Software is forked all the time. Mirrors are created all the time. A website moving domains is not a fork or a mirror. Therefore only .ca should be noted on the article and not the .co fork. Senor Laughs (talk) 13:36, 28 July 2019 (UTC)
  • For. Both sites are notable. This article should reflect that. Then we can cease this edit conflict nonsense for good. The original Uncyclopedia has two successor sites which still share 90% article DNA. --Gepid (talk) 21:23, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
  • For. The .co "fork" is notable. Especially as the majority of the community shifted over to it. If the Wikia/.ca site is notable then so is this. PKHilliam (talk) 17:38, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

No consensus

The above discussion in an attempt to establish consensus has been active for one week and there is no consensus reached on whether the fork should be mentioned on the page or not. Therefore I would conclude that the .co fork should not be mentioned on the article until a consensus to do this is established.

Any links to .co should therefore be changed to .ca, which is the site born from the ashes of the Wikia version. --BFDIBebble (talk) 18:22, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

That's preposterous. Lack of consensus regarding an article locked from editing doesn't mean it gets edited. Spike-from-NH (talk) 01:19, 4 August 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca
No consensus does not mean "no problem editing an article to reflect a specific POV that is being spread by sockpuppets and other unauthorized accounts". Kevindongyt (talk) 02:54, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
It is not preposterous at all. The question asked if the .co fork was notable and there is no consensus to determine that. It does not mean it should be automatically added to the article. Speaking of sockpuppets and unauthorized accounts, I see Kevindongyt is a SPA dedicated to Uncyclopedia and is himself pushing a specific POV. I suggest he stops. Senor Laughs (talk) 17:29, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
User:Senor Laughs is a sockpuppet attempting to spread their opinion. As someone who has attempted to enforce neutrality on Uncyclopedia article, going as far as to include .co and .ca simulatneously, the fact that there are so many sockpuppets invading my userpage, user accounts with barely a dozen edits attempting to spread their opinion here, proves that something is wrong here. Kevindongyt (talk) 17:57, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
In addition, I am sick of such sockpuppets threatening me with administrative action for COI, as "Senor Laughs" did just now on my talk page. (Compare "K7L" and "Isarra" and "Shahir Salim" four years ago. There seems to be one team devoted to article edits and another devoted to inhibiting adversaries.) I could not be clearer about my goal, for the original Uncyclopedia to prevail and for the Fork to stop trying to de-platform us across the web. My point on this page is completely different: that we return to the consensus of neutrality we had a couple years ago. Spike-from-NH (talk) 18:29, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
I might add here, an account under the name of 'BFDIBebble' has been blocked on uncyclopedia.ca for obvious sockpuppet activity. --Gepid (talk) 11:54, 6 August 2019 (UTC)
No, "BFDIBebble" is an Uncyclopedian who has done nothing since the site move except playing with templates and personal standing orders. "BFDlBebble" was the account blocked yesterday as the first edit was pasting onto another Admin's page a Wikipedia COI warning. Spike-from-NH (talk) 13:52, 6 August 2019 (UTC) Admin on uncyclopedia.ca

What I'm seeing here as an admin

I'm not sure the discussion above holds ANY merit at all about which fork to include or not because most of the input comes from either SPA accounts and/or users with a WP:COI. Let's summarize what we have so far:

It's a little irking that no experienced users are coming by to weigh in on this. Maybe because they lack the information, to comment. What I'm seeing right now, is that the objective consensus is to include both domains.—CYBERPOWER (Chat) 22:40, 6 August 2019 (UTC)

I should probably add myself to the list. I am an admin on both sites, and active on both sites. Unfortunately, this puts me stuck in the middle. Ideally, both uncyclopedia.ca and uncyclopedia.co should be included in the article, but I fear no outside news source has made any third party reports of either site although both sites have issued press releases. Uncyclopedia.ca is the new site of the community that was at uncyclopedia.wikia.com after 2015 that left Fandom (Fandom was Wikia's rebranding of themselves) in May 2019 when Fandom closed the wiki without input from the community. In 2013, uncyclopedia.co community members left Wikia to form their own wiki when they were dissatisfied with Wikia's policies. Fandom announced in March 2019 that the wiki there would be closed in 30 days. April 1st came, and the joke was on us - the wiki was still there. In April and May uncyclopedia.co made a generous offer to host the new site of the community that had remained on their servers, and make most of the admins of uncyclopedia.wikia.com admins at uncyclopedia.co. But some of the community that remained were suspicious of this offer, believing it too good to be true. When the name database turned out to be a stumbling block, nobody could log in to the new site that had been partially set up. To some, this confirmed their suspicions, and in the end, the site was hosted on servers not belonging to the Uncyclomedia Foundation that runs uncyclopedia.co and several related sites. To anyone reading this who is not involved with either site but is familiar with Wikipedia's policies, this would probably be considered original research since there are no reliable sources that can be cited. There are hard feelings on both sides, unfortunately - on one side because of the work they did do trying to set up a site that the other side rejected. On the other side - there are the suspicions that it was a setup for failure and the suspicions that they were and are trying to sabotage the community that remained behind when they left, suspicions that I do not share. And now both sides are suspicious that the other one is trying to sabotage them. So, you probably will not find much information about what really happened at any third party site, because at this time, the sides are so polarized - kind of like the current political climate in the United States between its two major political parties - and that is all I will say here about that. Userafw (talk) 02:19, 7 August 2019 (UTC)
Quite, including anonymous trolling, character assassination, and false-flag attacks, which have spilled over here. Was I who said that Uncyclomedia's "generous" offer to host us let them achieve their six-year goal of smothering us by simply doing nothing to support the move, even before it did exactly nothing. But you are right that this is all Original Research, apparently remarked on by no one outside the two clubs. Spike-from-NH (talk) 10:18, 7 August 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca
Internal wrangles aside, the objective is to write an accurate history of Uncyclopedia and then have the text agreed between both co and ca. The main point of dispute is whether the infobox points only to Uncyclopedia.co or points to both sites. For a historic reference see First Council of Nicaea. --Gepid (talk) 11:10, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
A quibble, Wikipedia's objective is not an "accurate history" of one (or two) private clubs, but to document what is visible to external objective sources. Agree that, if there is an Infobox stating where the website is, the answer is now "uncyclopedia.ca". I don't mind citing both websites, though there is no external media I know of documenting the 2013 decision to create a fork, much less its claim to be all of us. Spike-from-NH (talk) 13:43, 9 August 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca
Could you guys please stop making baseless accusations about our attempts to 'smother' your community, especially when you were the ones who ignored your own community's consensus in order to promote your own new fork? This squabble is ridiculous, and continuing to slander our work here is just ridiculous. By your logic any new fork apparently merits including, no matter how few users it has, and the more belligerent they are, the better? The very fact that your users have been going around spamming links everywhere here (across multiple projects and languages) to artificially promote your project should if anything be cause to dismiss the entire project as spam, unless you actually don't support that behaviour? (And if so, can you get them to stop/disassociate them from your project?) -— Isarra 14:56, 9 August 2019 (UTC)
Exactly. Attempting to artificially promote your project (on several different Wikipedias, including English, Simple English and French), and using sockpuppets to spread your opinion (especially here on the English Wikipedia) is something that is entirely inappropriate for Wikipedia itself. Kevindongyt (talk) 14:41, 10 August 2019 (UTC)
File above under "character assassination, and false-flag attacks". Regarding the spammers, again, "I know none of them." But I know Isarra: She is Lyrithia, co-owner of the Fork. Accusing us of what they are guilty of (such as purging this article of mention of the original website, with procedural moves against those who repair it), reverse the facts (that uncyclopedia.ca is "your own new fork"), and the tone of ridicule and dismissiveness, do indeed remind me of US party politics. Spike-from-NH (talk) 16:37, 9 August 2019 (UTC) Admin at uncyclopedia.ca
Politics and accusations aside, the question is should this article on Wikipedia be neutral and therefore refer to both websites or just one (via the infobox) as it currently stands. --Gepid (talk) 15:37, 14 August 2019 (UTC) (Romartus on the Uncyclopedias).

Protected edit request on 26 August 2019

Per MOS:YOU, the use of the second person on Wikipedia articles is avoided. So I propose to change "Choose your own adventure books" to "Any gamebooks" on a table of the section "Subprojects". —Yours sincerely, Soumyabrata (talksubpages) 17:53, 26 August 2019 (UTC)

  Not done this seems to be a take on Choose Your Own Adventure, if so it should be fixed with using proper nouns. In any case, can you provide a specific reference to this to clarify before it gets edited through protection? — xaosflux Talk 18:11, 26 August 2019 (UTC)
Concur, the use of the second person (the only one I see is in the infobox in section Subprojects) seems to be made by a Wikipedia project and not by the authors of this article. Spike-from-NH (talk) 00:54, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

Categorisation

can we remove humor and comedy and leave satire?Rathfelder (talk) 00:19, 13 October 2019 (UTC)

"Encyclopedia of silliness" listed at Redirects for discussion

 

An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Encyclopedia of silliness. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. 1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk) 23:34, 8 March 2020 (UTC)

I dont think its mentioned under this phrase. ProStop! (talk) 17:16, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 28 April 2020

Please revert all edits to the page made by BFDIBebble (talk · contribs), as they have been indefinitely blocked for abusing multiple accounts, and this appears to be the only topic for which the account was meaningfully used to begin with. While we don't know the purpose or the extent of this abuse, leaving the edits intact will only serve as incentive to continue such activity in the future.

For the same reason, I would also recommend treating any other edits with extreme skepticism as well. Basically, if you want to go through and you can find any other contributions that aren't clear antivandalism to other topics, reverting those as well would also probably be helpful, but I didn't find anything from a cursory look. -— Isarra 21:27, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

This is the revision we want instated I think. Aasim 00:54, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

Please confirm the post above mine, namely that the revision at 21:38, 23 April 2020 should be restored. Ping me once two editors other than Aasim have agreed and I'll implement. Johnuniq (talk) 09:49, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

I agree that the revision at 21:38, 23 April 2020 should be restored. Also, this image should be reverted to the upload from 24 May 2019. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 21:36, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
This. @Rock-O-Jello: That was your edit, what do you think? -— Isarra 21:57, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
RAGentry what do you think of restoring revision 952743675? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uncyclopedia&oldid=952743675 Aasim 21:32, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
I agree that the aforementioned revision should be restored, as per statements by Isarra and Zombiebaron. I also agree with Zombiebaron that this file should be reverted to its version from May 24, 2019. RAGentry (talk) 22:26, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
Looks like we may have a consensus to reinstate this revision, so pinging Johnuniq and reopening this edit request. Aasim 23:25, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Per the above, I reverted the article to revision 952743675 from 21:38, 23 April 2020. Please check it's as wanted.

@JJMC89: An outstanding request from above concerns File:Uncyclopedia screenshot.png which you edited to reduce the resolution of the current image. If you can't see a reason to the contrary, please restore the 21:18, 24 May 2019 revision of that image. Johnuniq (talk) 00:57, 1 May 2020 (UTC)

uncyc.ca or uncyc.co (or both)?

Apparently the page is now locked because of an edit war. I think we should include both URLs as they both are Uncyclopedia. Aasim 23:33, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

@Alison: ISTR you understood this topic (please ignore if I'm wrong) so perhaps you could comment on the recent edit war. I noticed this article and File:Uncyclopedia screenshot.png at WP:RFPP where full protection was requested due to a dispute over which website to feature. The meta:interwiki map uses en.uncyclopedia.co for Uncyclopedia, and there is an old (June 2018) request for removal at meta:Talk:Interwiki map#Uncyclopedia. The competitor apparently is uncyclopedia.ca. Johnuniq (talk) 07:04, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
I don't think there is any competition; what happened was that Uncyclopedia was forked in 2013 over fears of being shut down. Then the Fandom Uncyclopedia site was being shut down in April 2019 because of Fandom terms of use violations. Before the Fandom site was shut down, it was forked again.

BTW I just found this on what used to be a redirect to FANDOM uncyclopedia. Aasim 19:48, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
The original site was hosted at Wikia/FANDOM. A small group of editors forked from this site and started uncyclopedia.co. These users were known to be trolls in the wider Uncyclopedia community, who did not authorize this fork and some of these trolls have since been blocked for their behavior. So the original site stayed until Wikia/FANDOM closed it down and at this point we moved to uncyclopedia.ca. .ca is the original site moved from Wikia and is therefore the most notable.
Forks are made all the time. There's forks of Android that aren't noteworthy. There's forks of other wikis that are not noteworthy. Just because a small group forks a website doesn't make the fork "official", when the official site still exists. Therefore, uncyclopedia.ca is the site that should be mentioned and not .co. BFDIBebble (talk) (sockpuppet of PKHilliam) 22:10, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
I would like to know if you have any sources confirming that the users who started uncyclopedia.co are "known to be trolls in the wider Uncyclopedia community", especially considering that uncyclopedia.co has about six times the amount of active users as uncyclopedia.ca(see here and here), making it by far a majority of the "wider Uncyclopedia community", especially if it is only the English language Uncyclopedias that are being considered. I would also like to know if you have any sources confirming that some of the many users who facilitated the site move "have been blocked for their behavior". RAGentry (talk) 22:32, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
One of the administrators, Spike, has blocked several users from Uncyclopedia.co and claimed they are trolls. BFDIBebble (talk) (sockpuppet of PKHilliam) 00:20, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
The sockpuppet accounts banned by Spike today do not have counterparts on uncyclopedia.co, they are all copies of account names from en.wikipedia.org -- Zombiebaron (shout) 00:32, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
The site at uncyclopedia.org was made by a troll and should not be taken seriously. Anybody who writes anything such as Uncyclopedia.ca is not affiliated with en.uncyclopedia.co - in fact they are not speaking to each other is obviously trolling. BFDIBebble (talk) (sockpuppet of PKHilliam) 22:12, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
The site at uncyclopedia.org was in fact made by one of uncyclopedia.ca's three active bureaucrats, I'm not sure if that individual would be considered a troll at uncyclopedia.ca. RAGentry (talk) 22:32, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
As the situation currently stands, and considering BFDIBebble's active edit-warring, it is perhaps best to find a neutral solution that puts an emphasis on the activity level of each respective site, instead of individual editors' claim to any Uncyclopedia website's legitimacy. If the situation escalates further, it would be best to remove any and all links to Uncyclopedia from the article. Kevindongyt (talk) 22:43, 27 April 2020 (UTC)


uncyc.ca is the real one and the one you should mention. i have never heard of .co and it sounds as legit as a camrip dvd.Sircaustix (talk (sockpuppet of PKHilliam) • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic. The preceding unsigned comment was added at 00:35, 28 April 2020 (UTC) (UTC).

Uncyclopedia.ca has received extensive media coverage within the press and this dates back to the Wikicities/Wikia/Fandom days. Uncyclopedia.co on the other hand has not had any press coverage and is quite a small project in comparison. I believe with this in mind, Uncyclopedia.ca is the site that should have the sole link mention and not Uncyclopedia.co. Susborne (talk) (sockpuppet of PKHilliam) —Preceding undated comment added 00:38, 28 April 2020 (UTC) Susborne (talkcontribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
Hello Susborne, would you mind pointing me to some of the "extensive media coverage" that uncyclopedia.ca has received since its creation in May 2019? Also I am not sure how uncyclopedia.co is "quite a small project in comparison" to uncyclopedia.ca, considering that uncyclopedia.ca (19 active users) has only one sixth of the active userbase of uncyclopedia.co (123 active users). RAGentry (talk) 00:56, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I am strongly suspecting sockpuppetry here. Several newly created accounts are editing this talkpage in order to increase .ca's validity. Kevindongyt (talk) 00:41, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Should we open up a request for comment for .co vs .ca? Both? Neither? Aasim 00:46, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
Personally, I would prefer not starting RfC immediately, however if this doesn't resolve itself soon, then it would be a good idea - RfC can be a potentially lengthy process. Kevindongyt (talk) 00:50, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
I recommend opening up an RFC to settle this matter once and for all. BFDIBebble (talk) (sockpuppet of PKHilliam) 01:04, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
And... it's posted! See below. :) Aasim 01:39, 28 April 2020 (UTC) Or not... we have to wait a bit... Aasim 04:35, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Drafting an RfC (old)

@Johnuniq: Now that the dust has settled can we start an RfC to try to achieve consensus towards .co, .ca, both, neither, etc.? Aasim 07:36, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

An RfC is only needed if someone has a proposal for changing the article. Prior to this subsection there have been no comments on this talk, and no edits to the article, for a week. Is someone proposing a change? Johnuniq (talk) 07:43, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
I don't think so, but I do think that both domains should be included in the article. I have not implemented the change yet because I am not sure if there is consensus for or against having both domains listed there. Even then, there is an edit notice that says "Due to an ongoing dispute regarding which domain "uncyclopedia.ca" or "en.uncyclopedia.co" to use as the main page URL, any attempt to modify it without prior talk page discussions and subsequent consensus will be met with sanctions." At least the sock puppetry was dealt with for the most part. By listing both, we are not favoring one fork over another, but giving readers options.... but then, there is a question as to whether the .ca domain is notable. So maybe we may not need an RfC. It seems like it is just about changing the URL, not adding it back in anyway. Aasim 18:44, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
We generally don't bother holding RfCs in case a dispute arises; let's wait till then when issues will be more focused. Meanwhile, if you think there should be a change in the article, I suggest posting a new section with a reasonably concrete proposal: what would you include where? Then see what response occurs. If none, try editing the article. Johnuniq (talk) 00:45, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
Okay. The end. You can close this thread now Johnuniq :) Aasim 09:11, 9 May 2020 (UTC)
Just to add that the user here using the handle 'Romartus Imperator' is not me. My registered name at wikipedia is Gepid. I am known as Romartus on both uncyclopedia.ca and uncyclopedia.co --Gepid (talk) 08:47, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Request for Comment

Please hold off on this until the comments below are handled (should an RfC occur?) and until some background is posted to allow people unfamiliar with the topic (which is the point of an RfC) to understand the issue without being lost in "see old discussions". This is in accord with the close at the edit warring noticeboard (permalink). Johnuniq (talk) 04:00, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Should we include uncyclopedia.co or uncyclopedia.ca or both in the "Official site" section? Aasim 01:14, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

Uncyclopedia.co

Uncyclopedia.ca

Both

Some other site?

General Discussion

  • @Awesome Aasim: I believe this topic was already settled last August, I don't see any reason to discuss it further. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 01:51, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
  • I agree with Zombiebaron, we have already been through this and discussed this and a settlement was reached. We do not need to restart this discussion. RAGentry (talk) 02:59, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
  • Per the links in the hat note above (including the permalink), would anyone favoring a particular URL post a new section and edit it to taste in order to explain the background as you understand it. There are some good comments at the permalink and it would be very desirable to have them condensed into a clear statement here. There is no point holding an RfC to attract new editors if they are unable to readily see the issue and the arguments. Johnuniq (talk) 04:05, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
  • How do we determine that Uncyclopedia.co is notable enough to be mentioned? It is a fork of a website. So is mirror.uncyc.org and that is not notable and probably also not worth mentioning either. BFDIBebble (talk) (sockpuppet of PKHilliam) 17:37, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I believe my edit should be restored. .ca is not an official site, it's just a mirror created by editors with personal vendettas. Rocko (say hi!) 21:52, 30 April 2020 (UTC)

Protected edit request on 10 May 2020

Please revert all edits to the page made by Romartus Imperator (talk · contribs), as they have been abusing multiple accounts in a targeted harassment campaign. Please see above section for further information and consensus. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 07:59, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

I have reverted recent edits due to their failure to comply with the edit notice. Please be patient and do not use article talk pages to make allegations about other editors regardless of the provocation. Johnuniq (talk) 09:49, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, sorry if my request came across as impatient and I didn't mean to misuse this page for making allegations, I'm much more familiar with the way things work on Uncyclopedia and your way of doing things here is quite different. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 16:00, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
It may help to note that anyone editing under an uncyc username who already has an account here under another name (especially that they're already using to contribute to the discussion) is almost certainly not contributing in good faith, as they are obviously not who they claim to be. Maybe see if there's a place to report impersonators (even if it's just ANI), as even if they manage to vpn around showing up as a sock, that definitely isn't proper regardless? Also recommend anyone who hasn't create doppleganger accounts for their other names to do so in order to prevent this. -— Isarra 16:35, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Drafting an Rfc

The edit warring is continuing. Per the edit notice I will block any editor who again changes the URL without first gaining consensus here. An RfC is required for a long-term decision regarding what URL or URLs should be used in the article. The purpose of an RfC is to attract other editors who would probably not be aware of the background. Accordingly, would anyone interested please edit the appropriate subsection below and add a brief and neutral statement giving the history and a reason for your preferrred outcome. By "neutral", I mean without flamboyant language or talk about the evils of the other side. Take care to comment on article content only. You must not use this page to comment on other editors. Some information is at the edit warring permalink but it should be condensed and paraphrased here. Johnuniq (talk) 10:01, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Background

  • Uncyclopedia has existed since 2005, but both .co and .ca were founded at different times, both having been forked from uncyclopedia.wikia.com. Uncyclopedia.co was forked from it in January 2013, and Uncyclopedia.ca was forked from it in May 2019.
  • Within the .co community, Uncyclopedia.co is simply known as ".co", and Uncyclopedia.ca is known as ".ca". Within the .ca community, although that applies too, some users call Uncyclopedia.ca the "spoon", and Uncyclopedia.co the "fork", suggesting that .ca is the "legitimate Uncyclopedia". Sometimes, Uncyclopedia.co is known as "English", and Uncyclopedia.ca is known as "British English". KevTYD (talk) 17:27, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
  • Uncyclopedia is a humour wiki that was founded in 2005, and the founders of the wiki sold it to Wikia in 2006. After years of Wikia reneging on agreements made when they first began hosting Uncyclopedia, the vast majority of the community organized over IRC in 2012 and moved the contents of the wiki to en.uncyclopedia.co in January 2013. Wikia refused to stop hosting a copy of Uncyclopedia, which meant that a small portion of the pre-2013 community stayed behind to maintain the Wikia copy of Uncyclopedia. In 2019 Wikia decided that because of the amount of content on Uncyclopedia that was not suitable for their service (specifically the racist content), they would no longer be hosting Uncyclopedia. Historically the Uncyclopedia project has been governed by direct democracy, and the Uncyclopedian Wikia community held a vote as to what to do with their project after Wikia stopped hosting it. It was agreed that the project would move to the same hosting as en.uncyclopedia.co, however a group of admins acting independently of the community created and now host uncyclopedia.ca. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 16:41, 10 May 2020 (UTC)

Reasons to use en.uncyclopedia.co and not others

  • Many Uncyclopedia projects are in existence, spanning many languages under many different names. Most of these projects are held together under the "Uncyclomedia Foundation" umbrella, including related wikis like Illogicopedia, Encyclopædia Dæmonica, Zombiepedia, and others. en.uncyclopedia.co is referenced as the English-language Uncyclopedia project on all of these wikis, and interlanguage links point to the site using [[en:]]. It has been recognized as the English Uncyclopedia since 2013, when it took the place of the former Wikia url. When uncyclopedia.ca was founded in 2019 as a fork of the post-2013 Wikia site, it was categorized as the British English ([[en-gb:]]) Uncyclopedia to distinguish it from the existing English wiki, and all of the above websites refer to it as such.
The main subject of this article is about the English-language Uncyclopedia first and foremost, so I would suggest using en.uncyclopedia.co as the primary link in the infobox and gearing the opening paragraphs and the "History" section toward it. Specifically the creation of Uncyclopedia in 2005, the acquisition by Fandom in 2006, moving to the .co domain in 2013, the closure of the Fandom copy in 2019, and the remaining Fandom community's vote to rejoin the English project the same year. A previous revision more or less reflected this before it was lost to vandalism and edit warring.
As with the other languages and related projects, the history of the British English wiki should definitely be included where necessary, but documented on its own, either within the "History" section or under "Uncyclopedia in other languages." Supergeeky1 (talk) 07:26, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Reasons to use uncyclopedia.ca and not others

  • Uncyclopedia moved to Wikia and then when it was closed down, it moved to Uncyclopedia.ca. This is the official Uncyclopedia as far as I am concerned and should be the sole URL in use. Forks are made of websites all the time; it does not mean they are noteworthy. 220.123.235.96 (talk) 18:24, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
  • uncyclopedia.ca is a continuation of the project which has its roots in uncyclopedia.org which was purchased by Wikia and then hosted on their servers. This is the same project which existed from the very beginning and still exists today, just under a different URL. There are multiple forks of this version, such as mirror.uncyc.org, uncyc2.miraheze.org and of course uncyclopedia.co. I do not see how any one of these forks is more notable than the other and do not think they should be in the infobox at all. Romartus Imperator (talk) 23:20, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Reasons to use more than one URL

  • I think both URLs have a place in a page about the history of the project, but they should be described in a factual way: a small team maintains uncyclopedia.ca against the wishes of the Wikia Uncyclopedia community, while en.uncyclopedia.co has thrived for years. I know this comment is under the section for using more than one URL, but maybe we should use neither as the "official" URL and instead just present the history of each URL. There is no way that uncyclopedia.ca, a website created in 2019, is the "official" URL, but likewise its hard to make the claim that en.uncyclopedia.co is "official" because it has always existed alongside at least one other Uncyclopedia. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 16:41, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
  • Personally, I believe that while uncyclopedia.co definitely has more significance than uncyclopedia.ca, both URLs and how they came to be should be explained within the "History" section of the article, because there is a possibility that someone who is uninvolved within the Uncyclopedia edit-war and who is reading this article here might want to know about why there are several Uncyclopedias that can be found on search engines. There is absolutely no justification to why uncyclopedia.ca can be considered the "official" URL, but the claim that uncyclopedia.co is the "official" URL is weak, because (as Zombiebaron explained) for the history of .co, either uncyclopedia.wikia.com or uncyclopedia.ca has existed along it: while the interwiki for Uncyclopedia on a default MediaWiki installation (with the Interwiki extension) points to .co, the first search result for Uncyclopedia on various search engines (Google, Bing, Duckduckgo) points to .co, and .co has more active users, these points by themselves cannot designate .co as the "official" URL for Uncyclopedia. Therefore, both domains should be explained within History. By extent, the infobox URL, seemingly the prime target for these edit-wars, should be either left blank (See History) or point to whichever Uncyclopedia the community determines is most significant. KevTYD (talk) 17:37, 10 May 2020 (UTC)
    To clarify, I presume by 'community' as used here refers to wikipedia? Is that correct??--Gepid (talk) 10:01, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
  • History/disputes aside, the Uncyclopedia page should reflect the current reality of two uncyclopedias as they exist as of this time of commenting. The info box should also either show both active sites or just have the links in the main copy. Once this is agreed and monitored, any user coming here to remove links to either site or favour one over the other should be reverted. I am registered as Romartus on both Uncyclopedias. --Gepid (talk) 08:54, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
  • This would be the ideal solution. I did add the ".ca" domain over a year ago when UncycloWikia got shut down (it got reverted), and now no one can decide which URL is the good URL. Because of that, I think (for the time being until we can come to a consensus) we need either a filter and/or a spam blacklist entry until we can come to a consensus as to what domain should be used. Johnuniq do you want to do that for now? Aasim 02:13, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
    • (didn't see the header carefully, so here is my reason) Both domains are of importance to readers. There is no competition. Both URLs are important in the history of Uncyclopedia. Aasim 02:15, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
    • I don't think a filter is needed as consensus appears to be that both URLs should be mentioned. See discussion below. Johnuniq (talk) 05:04, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Discussion

@KevTYD, Zombiebaron, Gepid, and Awesome Aasim: (and anyone else watching this page). Given the responses above, no RfC appears to be necessary at the moment—both URLs should be mentioned. Have any reliable sources commented on Uncyclopedia and mentioned a particular non-wikia URL? Is there any source for the description above that uncyclopedia.co has thrived for years and uncyclopedia.ca was created in 2019? I assume such sources would be hard to find which will make writing about the URLs difficult per Wikipedia's procedures. The trick will be to devise some text that mentions both URLs, preferably using wording that is sourced or which can scrape by as potentially verifiable. That would probably mean not using much detail (unless a source for the detail is available). The article is currently protected to allow editing only by accounts with 500 edits and 30 days age. I propose changing that to require only 10 edits and 4 days (EdJohnston: do you have a view on that?). If any disruption occurs, I would either restore the protection or block problematic users after a warning. The aim would be to allow editing for a week or so until there is some reasonably stable text about the URLs. Then I think there should be an RfC with a question like "Should [this version] of the article be accepted as the consensus description of the URLs used by Uncyclopedia?". In the future, attempts to significantly change the description could be reverted per the consensus of the RfC (assuming it passed). Please do not edit war. If disruption breaks out, just leave it after a single revert and ping me. Any thoughts about this process? If there is agreement, I will alter the protection although anyone with 500/30 edits/days is welcome to start slowly editing now as far as I am concerned. Johnuniq (talk) 05:03, 13 May 2020 (UTC)

Ok done. I listed them in the order created (older fork first, newer fork second). Hopefully no one deletes or changes either of the links. Aasim 05:19, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks Awesome Aasim. Regards protection of the uncyclopedia page and infobox, I would suggest the current limited lockdown should deter people creating accounts deliberately to cause drama here. --Gepid (talk) 11:08, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
Personally, I do fear that diminishing the level of protection on the Uncyclopedia article will definitely aid any sockpuppets, if any are found (two sockmasters have been touching this article throughout the past twelve months). I think finding a consensus on a "good version" via draft versions and an eventual vote would be a better idea. This would allow less drama to happen now, and any drafts created with malicious intent could be disqualified later on during the RfC. The lack of sources on Uncyclopedia, especially on or after 2013, is definitely discouraging - we'll need to use the Wikipedia community's judgement then. For now, I'll be working on a draft at User:KevTYD/Uncyclopedia, with the intent of maintaining the neutrality of the article. KevTYD (wake up) 13:15, 13 May 2020 (UTC)
The second paragraph of History now ends with the decision by Fandom to cease hosting the site. This incorrectly suggests that this version is defunct. A year ago, there was an additional sentence:
Remaining users moved its content to uncyclopedia.ca, now the "British English" Uncyclopedia.
This sentence should be re-added to the end of the paragraph. Spike-from-NH (talk) 22:03, 3 June 2020 (UTC)
Any opinions on that? If done, wouldn't "British" need an explanation? Is that like UK English compared with US English? An explanation of that, particularly if unsourced, might be unnecessary and the British part could be omitted? Johnuniq (talk) 00:58, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
I believe the edit proposed by Spike-from-NH contains a heavily biased version of events. As seen in this discussion page hosted on uncyclopedia.ca the remaining users of the Wikia Uncyclopedia project voted to share hosting with en.uncyclopedia.co and a lone administrator moved the contents of the wiki to uncyclopedia.ca unilateraly. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 10:31, 4 June 2020 (UTC)
I have no idea about the background or really anything in connection with this topic, other than I have undertaken to be an uninvolved administrator monitoring this to see if an RfC is warranted, and, if so, how it might be run. However, in the interests of getting a resolution that might stick, I will ask for clarification. Is the suggestion that uncyclopedia.ca only has a tiny number of active users, much fewer than those at uncyclopedia.co? How about number of pages and page views? I'm assuming there are no independent reliable sources that address the overall issue so this article has to tread a fine line between stating encyclopedic and reasonable information and original research. Since the two sites definitely exist, it seems reasonable that .ca must have come from somewhere and that could and should be explained somehow. A sentence could be devised which does not mention how the shift occurred, merely that it did. Johnuniq (talk) 00:20, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Yes, even a cursory glance at the publicly available Special:ActiveUser pages shows that en.uncyclopedica.co has more than triple the active userbase of uncyclopedia.ca. My proposal for a sentence explaining where .ca came from is: A mirror of the Fandom Uncyclopedia was created at uncyclopedia.ca by a former site administrator. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 10:48, 5 June 2020 (UTC)
Fine, please make an edit. If the protection is a problem, let me know. However, surely some other more generic wording can be devised because the more detail that is included ("former" + "site" + "administrator") the more the sentence requires a reliable source. Would there be anything wrong with "Fandom later ceased hosting its version of Uncyclopedia[ref] on May 14, 2019, and a mirror of the site was created at uncyclopedia.ca."? Johnuniq (talk) 00:05, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Unfortunately I only have around 350 edits so I'm not eligible to edit the article. I agree that your suggested edit is much more concise than mine and definitely support it. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 01:45, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
@Zombiebaron: I changed the protection. Johnuniq (talk) 03:31, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
Thank you, I made the edit you suggested. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 09:00, 6 June 2020 (UTC)
How is the definition of a 'mirror site' be relevant here? The wikia hosted site is now gone so uncyclopedia.ca cannot be a mirror of that?? Just a general point of clarification required on the meaning of a mirror site as it is generally understood. --Gepid (talk) 13:32, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
@Gepid: As you can see above, the word "mirror" was chosen as the most concise way to describe how uncyclopedia.ca came to be. I do not know what definition of "mirror site" you believe is generally understood, but Wikipedia defines them as "replicas of other websites...often located in a different geographic region...[to] ensure availability of the original site for political reasons". As is documented in this discussion page hosted on uncyclopedia.ca, Fandom ceased hosting their copy of Uncyclopedia because of how much hate speech it contained. And as seen in this discussion page hosted on uncyclopedia.ca that I linked already above, a lone administrator copied the wiki to a server in Canada in order to maintain a public facing copy of the wiki and its racist content while the community moved to the en.uncyclopedia.co servers per the vote. It really seems to me that uncyclopedia.ca is a textbook example of a mirror site. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 14:51, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
Technically, I suspect "mirror" is the correct term for what would have happened (bearing in mind that I have no idea what actually happened—I'm just reporting some technical background). Wikia made database backups available, and someone would have had to get such a backup, then restore it on another server running MediaWiki. That is called mirroring. However, the point that mirror implies ongoing activity, where changes occuring on Wikia are copied to uncyclopedia.ca is also correct. How about replacing "mirror" with "copy" which probably better describes the situation? I'm hoping to find wording that is reasonably accurate, not wildly original research, and that (almost) everyone can live with. Johnuniq (talk) 23:58, 8 June 2020 (UTC)
I see what you mean about ongoing activity on an original being copied to a mirror. In that case, I suggest replacing "mirror" with "archive". -- Zombiebaron (shout) 00:44, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

Here are the three suggestions so far:

  • Fandom later ceased hosting its version of Uncyclopedia[ref] on May 14, 2019, and a mirror of the site was created at uncyclopedia.ca.
  • Fandom later ceased hosting its version of Uncyclopedia[ref] on May 14, 2019, and an archive of the site was created at uncyclopedia.ca.
  • Fandom later ceased hosting its version of Uncyclopedia[ref] on May 14, 2019, and a copy of the site was created at uncyclopedia.ca.

Problems:

  • Mirror implies an ongoing activity of updating the copy with changes from the original (see mirror site).
  • Archive is a bit of a techo word with an unclear meaning. Technically, an archive would be the single compressed file that Wikia would have created as a backup of their existing website. Restoring that archive on another server is not really an archive. Also, per Archive, an archive is a snapshot which does not change.

Is copy inaccurate? Johnuniq (talk) 02:50, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

I do think that "copy" accurately describes what uncyclopedia.ca is now, but I think that when describing where uncyclopedia.ca came from the word "copy" fails to describe the nuances of the situation in quite the same way as the other two options. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 04:21, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
In that case, you should be able to briefly explain some nuance of mirror and archive which are missing from copy. I can't see any difference except for the technicalities explained at mirror site and archive—technicalities which do not apply to uncyclopedia.ca. Also, what do you mean by "is now"? I thought there was no Uncyclopedia at Wikia any more, and that uncyclopedia.ca is different from the original copy. On both counts, "is now" doesn't apply. What am I missing? Johnuniq (talk) 05:30, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
As I've described above uncyclopedia.ca was created at the same time that the uncyclopedia.wikia.com community was moving to un.uncyclopedia.co. After un.uncyclopedia.co was sabotaged anybody wishing to edit the content formerly hosted at uncyclopedia.wikia.com was forced to edit uncyclopedia.ca. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 06:15, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
What was 'sabotaged' exactly? Writers have always been free to share their work on either uncyclopedia, as long as they were either the sole editor or had the agreement of other writers involved in a particular article. Uncyclopedia.ca has carried on since May 2019 with its copy of the original database and has subsequently added new articles there since that date. The original uncyclopedia.wikia has disappeared off the internet except as dead links. --Gepid (talk) 12:56, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
@Gepid: Do you disagree with me that uncyclopedia.ca was created as an archive of the content of uncyclopedia.wikia.com while the community of uncyclopedia.wikia.com worked to move to un.uncyclopedia.co? I chose the word "sabotaged" to describe what happened to un.uncyclopedia.co because I felt it described the way that project eventually failed without assigning blame. As you say, writers have always been free to share their work on either Uncyclopedia, but does my ability to edit mirror.uncyc.org change where it came from? -- Zombiebaron (shout) 15:43, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
By definition, if you can edit something, it is not a mirror. Johnuniq (talk) 03:32, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
After we resolve this issue we will need to resolve how mirror.uncyc.org is described in the article then, because you can most certainly edit it. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 11:04, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
Here's my take on it: "copy" is a very general-purpose word that could be used to describe .ca (when compared to UnWikia). The word "archive" would make more sense, as it is somewhat more precise. 'Mirror' would be inaccurate in this situation. Also, personally I believe that mirror.uncyc.org isn't of high significance either, and also can't exactly be described as a mirror because it can still be edited, albeit almost solely by IPs and quite infrequently. So.... "archive" could make sense for both .ca and mirror.uncyc.KevTYD (wake up) 22:33, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
'Sabotage' is usually meant to mean that something is deliberately damaged for a particular purpose or an act of resistance. I guess it depends on where you stand. It sounds emotive which isn't the wikipedian way? So we're back to understanding what 'mirror' means here Johnuniq. Can you have an active mirror or archive?--Gepid (talk) 09:17, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
I infer that there is tribal conflict that I don't understand which makes some prefer incorrect terms like mirror and archive whereas copy is plain-English and correct. I wondered about the earlier sentence with "sabotage" which I couldn't understand—I don't see how a wiki could be sabotaged because any actions by admins/editors can be reversed, and changes by the site owner would not qualify for that term. At any rate, that does not appear relevant for this article. Re the question, no, any wiki that can be edited is not a mirror or archive. I was hoping article wording could be sorted out in a reasonable way but an RfC with outsiders might be necessary. Johnuniq (talk) 09:55, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
If, as Johnuniq says, "mirror" and "archive" are both incorrect, then we should not use them. I disagree, however, that "copy" is correct. The word "copy" implies something made identical to another, which is not what uncyclopedia.ca is. The first time uncyclopedia.ca was ever mentioned it was called a "backup", and right now in the Infobox it is referred to as a "fork", can we discuss using either of those words? It is described in the link I gave but I'll quickly summarize how un.uncyclopedia.co was sabotaged: when un.uncyclopedia.co was first set up it had a lot of errors because Fandom uses janky old MediaWiki and upgrading several versions at once broke a lot of things, the bugs were never reported, the bugs were never fixed, and so the entire project was deliberately destroyed by inaction. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 14:55, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
Since Zombiebaron is talking about the now vanished wikia/fandom version of Uncyclopedia (deceased May 2019), I see this rake over old issues as unnecessary. I am quite willing to let others outside the uncyclopedia family to adjudicate on the wording of mirror/copy/archive as relates here for the wording of this article. Then we can all get on with our lives. --Gepid (talk) 17:15, 17 June 2020 (UTC)
@Gepid: What is your opinion on the wording? So far your only contribution to this conversation has been to claim that various things I have said are irrelevant. Instead of calling for outside mediation, wouldn't it be easier to at least attempt to reach an agreement? So far I have suggested four options, all of which you reject, and yet you have suggested none. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 04:14, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
Both .co and .ca are now mirror sites of a vanished original. There is the third mirror site also set up by CarlB but that is now an archive. So both uncyclopedia.co and uncyclopedia.ca are in effect mirror sites if I understand the wikipedia reference file, just that we no long have the 'original' around to compare to. --Gepid (talk) 13:00, 20 June 2020 (UTC)
If I'm understanding you correctly, you believe uncyclopedia.ca should be described as a "mirror" in the article, which is already the case. I'm glad we were able to reach an agreement. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 13:18, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
Both uncyclopedia.ca and uncyclopedia.co are therefore mirrors of uncyclopedia.wikia.com (no longer extant). Not the same thing. Don't twist words. --Gepid (talk) 21:06, 27 June 2020 (UTC)
I'm not sure how I've twisted your words, but perhaps this would be easier if you outlined what changes you would make to the wording of the sentence being discussed instead of making me guess. -- Zombiebaron (shout) 05:55, 29 June 2020 (UTC)