UnNews:Wikipedia bought by Uncyclopedia
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Wikipedia, one of the most prominent sites on the internet, has been sold to its competitor Uncyclopedia following an economic crisis resulting from vandalism on the Donate page causing the donation form to become unusable.
"In all honesty, we created the donation wiki in, like, 15 minutes. We had no reason to assume there would be actual vandalism, and I mean who would go out of their way to do that?" remarks Jimbo Wales, the creator of the science-extreme site.
The page w:donate:Special:AllPages was discovered by an anonymous user after attempting to find dirt on the former Wikimedia Foundation to make another iceberg meme. Not five minutes later, the ability to edit was discovered, but the user resisted making any changes. However, this did not stop vandals from discovering the page - and opening the door to chaos.
"Ways to Give vandalism?" lit up the administrators' noticeboard as a new thread attracted the attention of Wikimedia staff members, including TGorski2, who subsequently accidentally deleted the wiki before recovering it. But that one deletion sparked hundreds and hundreds of confused and angry threads at the WMF Village Pump. Jimbo Wales tried to get Wikipedia migrated to Fandom (formerly known as Wikia) before Uncyclopedia picked up the Fandom website.
Jimbo had no other choice: "In hindsight Fandom wasn't that good of a site. I mean, I made it, but then it spiraled out of control. I'm actually sort of glad I don't own it [....] it wasn't that good of a start anyways." He ended up selling the Wikimedia Foundation to the Uncyclopedia Foundation for $300 million, which promptly got integrated into Uncyclopedia.
Reactions were mixed: "I know there shouldn't be humor on this site, not counting the countless articles tagged with the {{Humor}} template, but I mean, Wikipedia can afford to be less than deadly serious every once in a while," recounted Primefac, a well-known bureaucrat and administrator. He advocated for the annexation after getting blocked following a lengthy trip to the local ANI and decided it would be a clean start, without knowing what a clean start really is. However, casual readers were not compliant, leading to a block of every single IP in the world.
As of December 14, 2021, the pre-merge Wikipedia has been archived and copied into Uncyclopedia.