66-449: Uncyclopedia is the name of several forks of satirical online encyclopedias that parody Misplaced Pages . Its logo, a hollow "puzzle potato ", parodies Misplaced Pages's globe puzzle logo , and it styles itself as "the content-free encyclopedia ", parodying Misplaced Pages's slogan of "the đź’•" and likely as a play the fact that Misplaced Pages is described as a " free-content " encyclopedia. Founded in 2005 as an English-language wiki ,
132-424: A project fork happens when developers take a copy of source code from one software package and start independent development on it, creating a distinct and separate piece of software. The term often implies not merely a development branch , but also a split in the developer community; as such, it is a form of schism . Grounds for forking are varying user preferences and stagnated or discontinued development of
198-448: A word processor for IBM PC compatible machines and Macintosh computers. Generally, such internal forks will concentrate on having the same look, feel, data format, and behavior between platforms so that a user familiar with one can also be productive or share documents generated on the other. This is almost always an economic decision to generate a greater market share and thus pay back the associated extra development costs created by
264-640: A "Pee Review" where authors seek review by other Uncyclopedians on humor, grammar, spelling, use of images, and overall presentation. Users can post to other wiki pages to solicit coding help and review or request user-edited images . Like Misplaced Pages, Uncyclopedia features articles and images on its front page. A system of user voting decides which articles and images to feature, usually deciding based on humor and writing quality. The site also welcomes audio contributions such as narration of articles. Uncyclopedia's articles often begin with quotations, usually misquoted, fictitiously attributed or entirely fabricated. Among
330-497: A different information style. Many of these are directly analogous to Misplaced Pages's sister projects, while others such as UnTunes and HowTo parody projects completely unrelated to Misplaced Pages. Uncyclopedia has been referenced in several well-known news publications from around the world, in addition to numerous local and regional newspapers and periodicals. In 2005 the Flying Spaghetti Monster entry from Uncyclopedia
396-446: A force, right? We just unified electro-weak, ok? The grand unified field theory still escapes us until the document licences too are just additional permissions on top of GPL. I don't know how we'll ever get there, that's gravity, it's really hard. The GNU FDL requires that licensees, when printing a document covered by the license, must also include "this License, the copyright notices, and the license notice saying this License applies to
462-529: A fork, with examples: Distributed revision control (DVCS) tools have popularised a less emotive use of the term "fork", blurring the distinction with "branch". With a DVCS such as Mercurial or Git , the normal way to contribute to a project, is to first create a personal branch of the repository, independent of the main repository, and later seek to have your changes integrated with it. Sites such as GitHub , Bitbucket and Launchpad provide free DVCS hosting expressly supporting independent branches, such that
528-405: A graphic located to the side of an article linking the related Misplaced Pages article to be used for "those without comedic tastes". Uncyclopedia encourages satire that is close to or resembles the truth. However, many articles employ absurdist humor and little, if any, factual accuracy remains. For example, Uncyclopedia's article about Misplaced Pages claims that Misplaced Pages is a parody of Uncyclopedia, not
594-518: A licensee is not allowed to save document copies "made" in a proprietary file format or using encryption. In 2003, Richard Stallman said about the above sentence on the debian-legal mailing list: This means that you cannot publish them under DRM systems to restrict the possessors of the copies. It isn't supposed to refer to use of encryption or file access control on your own copy. I will talk with our lawyer and see if that sentence needs to be clarified. A GNU FDL work can quickly be encumbered because
660-449: A link to the corresponding Misplaced Pages article ; Uncyclopedia often denotes the corresponding Misplaced Pages article to its content as being listed "for those without comedic tastes", and Misplaced Pages's article written by "so-called experts ". Uncyclopedia was launched on January 5, 2005, by Jonathan Huang, known online as "Chronarion", and a partner known online as "Stillwaters". It was originally situated at uncyclopedia.org . In July 2006, it
726-838: A long period of discussion and negotiation between and amongst the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, the Wikimedia Foundation and others had produced a proposal supported by both the FSF and Creative Commons to modify the Free Documentation License in such a fashion as to allow the possibility for the Wikimedia Foundation to migrate the projects to the similar Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) license. These changes were implemented on version 1.3 of
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#1732794536413792-470: A new, different title must be given and a list of previous titles must be kept. This could lead to the situation where there are a whole series of title pages, and dedications, in each and every copy of the book if it has a long lineage. These pages cannot be removed until the work enters the public domain after copyright expires. Richard Stallman said about invariant sections on the debian-legal mailing list: The goal of invariant sections, ever since
858-540: A proprietary grant in the form of a Contributor License Agreement .) Examples include macOS (based on the proprietary NeXTSTEP and the open source FreeBSD ), Cedega and CrossOver (proprietary forks of Wine , though CrossOver tracks Wine and contributes considerably), EnterpriseDB (a fork of PostgreSQL , adding Oracle compatibility features ), Supported PostgreSQL with their proprietary ESM storage system, and Netezza's proprietary highly scalable derivative of PostgreSQL. Some of these vendors contribute back changes to
924-540: A version of the program. The term was in use on Usenet by 1983 for the process of creating a subgroup to move topics of discussion to. "Fork" is not known to have been used in the sense of a community schism during the origins of Lucid Emacs (now XEmacs ) (1991) or the Berkeley Software Distributions (BSDs) (1993–1994); Russ Nelson used the term "shattering" for this sort of fork in 1993, attributing it to John Gilmore . However, "fork"
990-550: Is dual-licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 and the GFDL . As of May 2024, the English-language Uncyclopedia contains approximately 37,700 articles. Many articles on Uncyclopedia link to corresponding Misplaced Pages article on the subject, and they often designate Misplaced Pages's content as being written by "so-called experts"; this is most often denoted by Uncyclopedia articles with a corresponding Misplaced Pages article having
1056-550: Is no global governing organization comparable to the Wikimedia Foundation that oversees Misplaced Pages as well as its sister projects. Uncyclopedia's content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license, although some content, notably images, is copyrighted. Different Uncyclopedias sometimes have different licenses; for example, dÉsencyclopédie (French Uncyclopedia)
1122-418: Is sometimes made when the forked software is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the original project, e.g. MariaDB for MySQL or LibreOffice for OpenOffice.org . The BSD licenses permit forks to become proprietary software, and copyleft proponents say that commercial incentives thus make proprietisation almost inevitable. (Copyleft licenses can, however, be circumvented via dual-licensing with
1188-681: The Boston Herald and The Guardian . Although most articles mentioning Uncyclopedia are specific to the site, there are other articles about Wikia or Misplaced Pages that just mention its name briefly. These include the editorial in The Register discussing the Seigenthaler incident , in which Uncyclopedia was named only once. It has also been listed as one of the "Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites" in PC Magazine , as well as among
1254-601: The Sioux City Journal , Hawke's Bay Today , and Lochaber News . In January 2008, the Malaysian Internal Security Ministry issued a directive alerting newspaper editors not to trust Uncyclopedia. It said the article concerning Malaysia contained "untruths, insults and ridicule" and was demeaning to the country. The site uses a layout that looks similar to Misplaced Pages 's, which may confuse inexperienced users who misinterpret
1320-594: The Debian project, Thomas Bushnell , Nathanael Nerode, and Bruce Perens have raised objections. Bruce Perens saw the GFDL even outside the "Free Software ethos": "FSF, a Free Software organization, isn't being entirely true to the Free Software ethos while it is promoting a license that allows invariant sections to be applied to anything but the license text and attribution. [...] the GFDL isn't consistent with
1386-547: The GNU Project . It is similar to the GNU General Public License , giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify (except for "invariant sections") a work and requires all copies and derivatives to be available under the same license. Copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities (greater than 100), the original document or source code must be made available to
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#17327945364131452-491: The "101 most useful websites" on the internet by The Sunday Telegraph . Seattle Post-Intelligencer considers Uncyclopedia to be the wiki site equivalent of The Onion . At various times, articles on Uncyclopedia have been subject to criticism from King's College (School, Auckland) the North-West Evening Mail , Northern Irish politician James McCarry, civic leaders of Telford , Shropshire , UK ,
1518-535: The 80s when we first made the GNU Manifesto an invariant section in the Emacs Manual, was to make sure they could not be removed. Specifically, to make sure that distributors of Emacs that also distribute non-free software could not remove the statements of our philosophy, which they might think of doing because those statements criticize their actions. The GNU FDL is incompatible in both directions with
1584-487: The Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially" and therefore is incompatible with material that excludes commercial re-use. As mentioned above, the GFDL was designed with commercial publishers in mind, as Stallman explained: The GFDL is meant as a way to enlist commercial publishers in funding free documentation without surrendering any vital liberty. The 'cover text' feature, and certain other aspects of
1650-458: The Document". This means that if a licensee prints out a copy of an article whose text is covered under the GNU FDL, they must also include a copyright notice and a physical printout of the GNU FDL, which is a significantly large document in itself. Worse, the same is required for the standalone use of just one (for example, Misplaced Pages) image. Several Wikimedia projects have over the years abandoned
1716-527: The Document, but exist as front-matter materials or appendices. Secondary sections can contain information regarding the author's or publisher's relationship to the subject matter, but not any subject matter itself. While the Document itself is wholly editable and is essentially covered by a license equivalent to (but mutually incompatible with) the GNU General Public License , some of the secondary sections have various restrictions designed primarily to deal with proper attribution to previous authors. Specifically,
1782-839: The Fandom Uncyclopedia site incompatible with later MediaWiki versions. In May 2018, Fandom dropped support for the Monobook skin that its Uncyclopedia site had used to mimic Misplaced Pages, claiming this was necessary to achieve GDPR compliance, and warned that local work-arounds could not be extended to new visitors and editors by default. Since all Uncyclopedias split off or were removed from Fandom, they mostly switched to using Vector instead (with MinervaNeue on mobile), in order to continue parodying Misplaced Pages. Uncyclopedia projects are run independently by their own members, though some users have accounts on multiple Uncyclopedias. They contain interlanguage links to each other, but there
1848-524: The GFDL if such fair use is covered by all potential subsequent uses. One example of such liberal and commercial fair use is parody . Although the two licenses work on similar copyleft principles, the GFDL is not compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license . However, at the request of the Wikimedia Foundation , version 1.3 added a time-limited section allowing specific types of websites using
1914-455: The GFDL to additionally offer their work under the CC BY-SA license. These exemptions allow a GFDL-based collaborative project with multiple authors to transition to the CC BY-SA 3.0 license, without first obtaining the permission of every author, if the work satisfies several conditions: To prevent the clause from being used as a general compatibility measure, the license itself only allowed
1980-482: The GFDL. In the case of Baidu, Misplaced Pages representatives asked the site and its contributors to respect the terms of the licenses and to make proper attributions. Some critics consider the GFDL a non-free license. Some reasons for this are that the GFDL allows "invariant" text which cannot be modified or removed, and that its prohibition against digital rights management (DRM) systems applies to valid usages, like for "private copies made and not distributed". Notably,
2046-645: The GPL—material under the GNU FDL cannot be put into GPL code and GPL code cannot be put into a GNU FDL manual. At the June 22–23, 2006 international GPLv3 conference in Barcelona, Eben Moglen hinted that a future version of the GPL could be made suitable for documentation: By expressing LGPL as just an additional permission on top of GPL we simplify our licensing landscape drastically. It's like for physics getting rid of
Uncyclopedia - Misplaced Pages Continue
2112-530: The Noosphere , stated that "The most important characteristic of a fork is that it spawns competing projects that cannot later exchange code, splitting the potential developer community". He notes in the Jargon File : Forking is considered a Bad Thing—not merely because it implies a lot of wasted effort in the future, but because forks tend to be accompanied by a great deal of strife and acrimony between
2178-499: The Portuguese. The Fandom version of the site now shows only a "Not a valid community" landing page . A third site, at mirror.uncyc.org , functions only as a mirror website with backup copies of some Uncyclopedia pages. Uncyclopedia is built on the same MediaWiki software that Misplaced Pages uses. However, during Fandom's (Wikia's) hosting of Uncyclopedia, Fandom extensively modified its version of MediaWiki version 1.19, making
2244-696: The article in the Arizona Daily Star , which focused on the Tucson, Arizona parody, and the article in the Cyprus Mail , which focused on the Cyprus article. In addition to articles about specific entries on the wiki, several papers speak of the website in general – usually in a section devoted to technology or the Internet . This was the case when Uncyclopedia was referenced in
2310-542: The authors of prior versions have to be acknowledged and certain "invariant sections" specified by the original author and dealing with his or her relationship to the subject matter may not be changed. If the material is modified, its title has to be changed (unless the prior authors permit to retain the title). The license also has provisions for the handling of front-cover and back-cover texts of books, as well as for "History", "Acknowledgements", "Dedications" and "Endorsements" sections. These features were added in part to make
2376-470: The change to occur before August 1, 2009. At the release of version 1.3, the FSF stated that all content added before November 1, 2008, to Misplaced Pages as an example satisfied the conditions. The Wikimedia Foundation itself after a public referendum, invoked this process to dual-license content released under the GFDL under the CC BY-SA license in June 2009, and adopted a foundation-wide attribution policy for
2442-428: The community project, while some keep their changes as their own competitive advantages. In proprietary software , the copyright is usually held by the employing entity, not by the individual software developers. Proprietary code is thus more commonly forked when the owner needs to develop two or more versions, such as a windowed version and a command line version, or versions for differing operating systems, such as
2508-658: The content as factual. In November 2012, the page "HowTo:Commit suicide" on Absurdopedia , the Russian-language Uncyclopedia, was legally prohibited by the Russian Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights Protection and Human Welfare (Rospotrebnadzor). Absurdopedia administrator Edward Chernenko unsuccessfully sued them under his right to science and culture guaranteed by the Russian Constitution. During
2574-520: The creators of the list reveal that they have once again put off the list until the last second, and simply skip a large chunk to get to a hundred in time. Other Uncyclopedia traditions include creating a "top 10" list of articles for each year, chosen by popular vote. As well as housing many articles designed to satirize Misplaced Pages-style content, Uncyclopedia contains several secondary projects (known as "UnProjects"). As of 2017, there were sixteen such subprojects, each of which specializes in parody of
2640-451: The ethos that FSF has promoted for 19 years." In 2006, Debian developers voted to consider works licensed under the GFDL to comply with their Debian Free Software Guidelines provided that the invariant section clauses are not used. However, their resolution stated that even without invariant sections, GFDL-licensed software documentation is considered to be "still not free of trouble" by the project, namely because of its incompatibility with
2706-418: The fact that the GFDL "does not allow for easy duplication and modification", especially for digital documentation. The GNU FDL contains the statement: You may not use technical measures to obstruct or control the reading or further copying of the copies you make or distribute. A criticism of this language is that it is too broad, because it applies to private copies made but not distributed. This means that
Uncyclopedia - Misplaced Pages Continue
2772-488: The fork. A notable proprietary fork not of this kind is the many varieties of proprietary Unix —almost all derived from AT&T Unix under license and all called "Unix", but increasingly mutually incompatible. See Unix wars . GFDL The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or GFDL ) is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for
2838-454: The larger group, or whoever controls the web site, will retain the full original name and the associated user community. Thus, there is a reputation penalty associated with forking. The relationship between the different teams can be cordial or very bitter. On the other hand, a friendly fork or a soft fork is a fork that does not intend to compete, but wants to eventually merge with the original. Eric S. Raymond , in his essay Homesteading
2904-411: The license more financially attractive to commercial publishers of software documentation, some of whom were consulted during the drafting of the GFDL. "Endorsements" sections are intended to be used in official standard documents, where the distribution of modified versions should only be permitted if they are not labeled as that standard anymore. The GFDL requires the ability to "copy and distribute
2970-487: The license that deal with covers, title page, history, and endorsements, are included to make the license appealing to commercial publishers for books whose authors are paid. Material that restricts commercial re-use is incompatible with the license and cannot be incorporated into the work. However, incorporating such restricted material may be fair use under United States copyright law (or fair dealing in some other countries) and does not need to be licensed to fall within
3036-432: The license, which includes a new provision allowing certain materials released under the (GFDL) license to be used under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license also. Material licensed under the current version of the license can be used for any purpose, as long as the use meets certain conditions. The license explicitly separates any kind of "Document" from "Secondary Sections", which may not be integrated with
3102-602: The logo displayed for Greggs on its Google profile was mistakenly temporarily switched to the logo used on Uncyclopedia's article on the subject at the Wikia site due to a caching issue, causing a PR crisis for the company. In 2017, two pages of Absurdopedia were banned in Russia: "HowTo:Bathe a cat" for "calls to violence against animals" and "HowTo:Make a nuclear bomb" for "information on manufacturing weapons". Fork (software development) In software engineering ,
3168-522: The major free software licenses. Those opposed to the GFDL have recommended the use of alternative licenses such as the BSD License or the GNU GPL. The FLOSS Manuals foundation, an organization devoted to creating manuals for free software, decided to eschew the GFDL in favor of the GPL for its texts in 2007, citing the incompatibility between the two, difficulties in implementing the GFDL, and
3234-417: The most recurrent themes is the invention of quotes attributed to Oscar Wilde , prompted by an article stating that inventing Wilde quotes was the "national sport of England ", and themes such as "kitten huffing" (the inhalation of the souls of cats as a form of drug abuse ). Much like Misplaced Pages, Uncyclopedia has policies concerning vanity articles, which are articles written by an individual associated with
3300-419: The original software. Free and open-source software is that which, by definition, may be forked from the original development team without prior permission, and without violating copyright law. However, licensed forks of proprietary software ( e.g. Unix ) also happen. The word "fork" has been used to mean "to divide in branches, go separate ways" as early as the 14th century. In the software environment,
3366-568: The proceedings, the Russian government and its experts claimed that Absurdopedia is intentionally trying to increase the number of child suicides in Russia by providing children with instructions for killing themselves. As of 2013, the case is currently in the ECHR . In 2014, the page "HowTo:Make a bomb at home" on Absurdopedia was included in the Russian list of extremist materials . In August 2014,
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#17327945364133432-558: The project spans more than 75 languages as well as several subprojects parodying other wikis. Uncyclopedia's name is a portmanteau of the prefix un- and the word encyclopedia . Various styles of humor are used as vehicles for parody, from pointed satire to light sarcasm, along with structured in-jokes and frequent non sequiturs . The site has attracted media attention for its articles on controversial subjects including religion , prominent people, places, politics , and pseudoscience . Many Uncyclopedia articles contain graphics with
3498-426: The reverse. Many articles on the site contradict each other, even articles on the same subject. Like Misplaced Pages's "Five pillars", Uncyclopedia has "Five pliers", including "Satirical point of view". Its code of conduct follows from three main rules: "Be funny and not just stupid", "Don't be a dick", and "Dance like you've never danced before!" Parodying Misplaced Pages's article review service peer review , Uncyclopedia has
3564-447: The subject of the page. Vanity articles were disallowed after many of them produced flame wars . Uncyclopedia does not police conflict of interest but may delete submissions as non-notable on a case-by-case basis, using an AfD -like system called "Votes for deletion" (VfD) and a CSD -like system called "QuickVFD". One of Uncyclopedia's most popular articles, "AAAAAAAAA!", is a nonsensical page, with its content completely consisting of
3630-481: The successor groups over issues of legitimacy, succession, and design direction. There is serious social pressure against forking. As a result, major forks (such as the Gnu-Emacs / XEmacs split, the fissioning of the 386BSD group into three daughter projects, and the short-lived GCC/EGCS split) are rare enough that they are remembered individually in hacker folklore. David A. Wheeler notes four possible outcomes of
3696-401: The technical, social and financial barriers to forking a source code repository are massively reduced, and GitHub uses "fork" as its term for this method of contribution to a project. Forks often restart version numbering from numbers typically used for initial versions of programs like 0.0.1, 0.1, or 1.0 even if the original software was at another version such as 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0. An exception
3762-515: The upper case letter A with images and some punctuation marks. Some jokes involve the entire website, sometimes including a re-skin of the main page, such as with holiday themes. In 2012, as a parody of Misplaced Pages's black-out protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) et al., Uncyclopedia blocked all content for a day with a notice claiming to support the bills. A tradition of April Fool's Day front page pranks occurs on
3828-475: The use of content from Wikimedia Foundation projects. There have currently been no cases involving the GFDL in a court of law, although its sister license for software, the GNU General Public License , has been successfully enforced in such a setting. Although the content of Misplaced Pages has been plagiarized and used in violation of the GFDL by other sites, such as Baidu Baike , no contributors have ever tried to bring an organization to court due to violation of
3894-463: The whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this. 3. Derived Works: The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software. In free software, forks often result from a schism over different goals or personality clashes. In a fork, both parties assume nearly identical code bases, but typically only
3960-619: The wiki, including a "blood donation" plea banner to spoof wiki donation banners on April 1, 2014. For one week in 2013, the Wikia fork interrupted viewing with a claim that the site was unavailable, spoofing a notice on the NASA website during the United States federal government shutdown of 2013 . Each year, Uncyclopedia writers create a list of 100 worst reflections of that year, marking website milestones or simply news. Most years,
4026-404: The word evokes the fork system call, which causes a running process to split itself into two (almost) identical copies that (typically) diverge to perform different tasks. In the context of software development, "fork" was used in the sense of creating a revision control " branch " by Eric Allman as early as 1980, in the context of Source Code Control System : Creating a branch "forks off"
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#17327945364134092-540: The work's recipient. The GFDL was designed for manuals , textbooks, other reference and instructional materials, and documentation which often accompanies GNU software. However, it can be used for any text-based work, regardless of subject matter. For example, the free online encyclopedia Misplaced Pages uses the GFDL (coupled with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License ) for much of its text, excluding text that
4158-702: Was acquired by Fandom , then known as Wikia. In January 2013, some Uncyclopedia editors and administrators set up a fork of Uncyclopedia at en.uncyclopedia.co , in response to Wikia's censorship, insertion of advertising, and the imposition of content warnings. Fandom ceased hosting its version of Uncyclopedia on May 14, 2019, and the Fandom site (colloquially known as the "spoon", a play on "fork") moved to uncyclopedia.ca , and in September 2021 to uncyclopedia.com . In 2023, each of these English-language versions had approximately 37,000 content pages, second only to
4224-611: Was imported from other sources after the 2009 licensing update that is only available under the Creative Commons license. The GFDL was released in draft form for feedback in September 1999. After revisions, version 1.1 was issued in March 2000, version 1.2 in November 2002, and version 1.3 in November 2008. The current state of the license is version 1.3. On December 1, 2007, Misplaced Pages founder Jimmy Wales announced that
4290-577: Was in use in the present sense by 1995 to describe the XEmacs split, and was an understood usage in the GNU Project by 1996. Free and open-source software may be legally forked without prior approval of those currently developing, managing, or distributing the software per both The Free Software Definition and The Open Source Definition : The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this, you can give
4356-613: Was mentioned in a New York Times column reporting the spread of " Pastafarianism ", the religion that worships the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The column was then reprinted in other newspapers, including the Taipei Times . The magazine .net featured an interview with Huang about Uncyclopedia in May 2007. A number of other articles have been centred on specific entries on Uncyclopedia – most notably
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