Has Uncle Pete hit rock bottom?

After Uncyclopedia's Forest Fire Week 2011, Nerd42 and Kevillips tied for the petaQ'a'pedia logo contest and the discovery of Cheeses, you'd think there couldn't be any more controversies. But then again...

It seems that Uncyclopedia, ?pedia's well-known competitor, has had an error that made all of the pages look like plain old HTML. Not at all like Wikipedia's new look, which is obviously what they wanted it to look like.

Well, we at ?pedia say go get 'em! Anything that takes the heat off of us and Roberto, Roberta, oscar.uncyclomedia.org or whoeverthehellheis is awesome. (Plus I'm still mad at them for huffing all my articles in the Forest Fire Week 2011.)

That reminds me: did you know that Encyclopædia Dramatica is lower than ever?

My Quite Serious Opinion

This wiki has a problem and I am really fed up with it.

I think all this Holier-Than-Thou, anti-corporate "We don't have the backing of large organizations" talk has a major flaw in it's reasoning.

It's Roberto!

I would call this, "The Roberto Fallacy."

The Roberto Fallacy is the idea that anything is better than what everybody else is using, even if it doesn't actually work. This is why Ubuntu has been erroneously called "Linux for Normal People."

In case you don't get it: he's been spending all weekend digging through forum posts and getting trolled on IRC channels trying to get his Linux box to do simple tasks that it should do automatically by default without having to deal with any of that crap.

Anyway, the point is that clearly, independent hosting is not working for us. It has too much independence and not enough hosting. The site seems to be down more than it's up!!

Carib is a great guy and it's wonderful that he's been willing to donate the use of the servers and whatnot and I'm not being critical of him. This is not his fault at all. But something needs to be done to get us to a point where our site works regardless whether it's independent or looks exactly the way we want it to look or whatever other crap. Functionality: being UP and RUNNING must trump every other consideration.

Something's got to be done here. We've got to get the site running reliably, all the time. That might mean going back to Wikia or some other less than perfect outcome. But anything beats having no site.

BTW, I have an old, seldom-updated blog where I've written down some pointless rants in favor of a more balanced view of the free software and free culture movement.

Shocking: Captain Obvious looks back on terrible past

2009 counts four numbers.
~ Captain Obvious

Was 2009 an experience to you?

No, not really. In the beginning -I'm talking about 2006- I was very popular, many users liked me, also other interwiki projects copied me. I appeared in almost every article on Uncyclopedia. You know, in that quotation column. But later, unfortunately, people didn't like me anymore and they started deleting my jokes from their articles... I mean the articles on the wikis, not in newspapers. So, yeah, 2008 and 2009 were kinda boring. I also felt it in my pocket: next year, I'm gonna be fired by Wikia. The so called "community" doesn't want to keep me any longer. The contract will be broken, it's that simple!

You're serious? Your future seems very bad, doesn't it?

Of course it is! I had almost a contract with Marvel to commercialise myself, you know, promoting. I can just forget it now. Thank you Wikia! ...(pause)... That was meant to be ironical. One positive fact is that I don't have to travel six hours from and to San Francisco any more, you know, that city north of LA, Los Angeles, not Angela no no... You can imagine: always in that same boring rush hour in the evenings. But I lost my fucking job now, and the only thing that remains is... my guitar!

Oh really? You play on the guitar?

Yeah, fun isn't it? I have some concerts next week in Salt Lake City, in a concert room in a bar. Everyone is invited by the way. I mean, children, adults... I have 20 tickets. Good enough to buy food for a month, you know, 30 days.

Captain, do you have a girlfriend?

No, I am not thinking about it yet. You know, a girlfriend is a girl, and girls can become pregnant. It will be to hard and to expensive for me. You know, money, I won't have a job any more, remember? You know, working brains... if you are remembering...

It was good to hear from you again. Thanks for the interview.

You're welcome. You know, I mean...

It's alright...

A year of independence: The Wikia debacle revisited

It's been one whole year since Illogicopedia moved from Wikia's servers, and it's verily shot by. Seems like only yesterday I was ranting my ass off at Wikia and their uncanny ability to cheese people off royally.

But for all that bad blood, I really don't think Wikia are that evil. The extreme views expressed within the pages of this weblog are all in good humour, you understand (or perhaps not: looks like we managed to fool one or two people with our Wikia-bashing along the way).

That's not to say I actually like Wikia: in fact, it's doubtful whether I ever did, even when Illogicopedia was with them. There's something about it that makes it all incompatible with everything Illogico, and by proxy I, stand for. Perhaps its the whole corporate image, or the fact it promotes profiting from volunteer spirit.

Yes, we were grateful when they took us on, but it was a means to an end. As has been mooted numerous times, it was always an idea for Illogicopedia to go it alone, so to speak, and moving to Wikia was simply a stepping stone.

It's still the ultimate goal for Illogicopedia to be self-funding, and maybe one day when I get a job that actually pays more than peanuts we may actually get to the point where we become the commercialised ones, with Illogico mugs and T-Shirts and the like. Oh, how the boot will be on the other foot then!

That's all in the future though. To mark Illogicopedia's first whole year of independence, I've posted a bit of an analysis over at one of those free-to-host places on the interwebs. It's a bit dry, but will hopefully bring to the attention of the general public the plight of small wikis such as ourselves. It's one of the bigger user-generated content sites, so who knows, maybe somebody from the mainstream media may read it.

The Crumbling Wikia Foundations

Why Wikia Sucks 101:

Wikia is dependant on its users, but it treats them like shit.

Wikia ought to start paying its users

I hear the cries of "you're crazy, yak," but hear me out on this.

It's the perfect way to get more active users - pay those that edit the most - employ them as workers for their site. You might say that this would never work, but why wouldn't it? Wikia ought to start doing the decent thing and start rewarding the people who are making the company money - i.e., us.

Instead of funding crappy copycat projects like WikiAnswers and Wikia Search -- the latter of which collapsed recently -- why not focus on the very thing that keeps the visitors coming - the editors?

And if they're so in love with advertisements, why not go all out on a 50-50 page advert to content ratio and financially reward the users; actually give something back to the very people who give up their own time, bandwidth and money to further the project.

Of course, it's never going to happen. But it would be a fun concept - paid wiki editing. I'm well aware that all the most successful wikis through time have functioned well enough with unpaid volunteers (Wikipedia et al), but is that because the founders were more interested in making money for themselves rather than rewarding their users?

Something to think about anyway.

W*kia

Well, as nobody may have noticed, (except for Hindleyite, who seems to be nauseous from our latest laughing gas leak.) it appears that Wikia's ghost town of ?pedia has dropped off the google rankings of our sitename :D. Can I be the first to say "F*cking Finally!"

And now for an image of Duncan's goods.


So, also Hindleyite commented on a post he made to w*kia's ripoff of various other answers sites which beg for users to answer the questions the site owners cant be bothered to answer themselves. Well, it seems in an attempt to dodge the bullet, they have deleted the question. In typical style, it seems w*kia (or at least it's representatives) are willing to put their hands in their ears and pretend as though it never happened.

I'd finally like to say how grateful we are to Carl for providing us free hosting. And i unlike some users, am not going to look a gift-horse in the mouth over the downtime we get for about 10 minutes a night.

Wikiquestions: Why is Wikia such a sellout?

Wikia is never afraid of stealing other peoples' ideas and using them to their own advantage. At least Illogicopedia acknowledges its parodies - Wikia is becoming a parody of itself.

Also, get Jimbo's ugly fizzog out of my face!

Wikia renames old site as "Wackypedia"

http://wackypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page


Well, that should solve that then. Enough bashing Wikia, OK? Let's move on. :)