Uncyclopedia:Uncyclopedia is not a dictionary

This page is considered an ignorable policy on Uncyclopedia.

It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that everyone should follow, unless they don't want to, in which case they are free to ignore it, in which case nobody will care. Please make use of the standing on one knee position to propose to this policy.

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Part of What Uncyclopedia is not.

Uncyclopedia is not a dictionary, and an entry that consists of just a short one liner, no matter how funny does not belong: But, an article can and should always begin with a false definition or an obfuscated description of the topic. If you're interested in working on a lying, cheating dictonary, check out the Undictionary project!

Nearly no-one here agrees that in general, stub articles are to be encouraged, even if they meet certain criteria. There are likewise some differences of opinion as to whether untrue definitions are acceptable for beginning an article. If you want to make everybody happy, write a funny fully detailed entry. Otherwise, they may simply take the entry to be a "stub" article, which will be huffed later. That's probably OK, in most cases, but some view this as either a waste of good material, or otherwise a waste of QuickVFDers time. Deletion is a necessary process on Uncyclopedia and articles which do not meet minimum reasonable criteria can be huffed rather quickly —for some, the potential of a stub is not as important as the fact that its not yet an article.

Moreover, there are plenty of senses of terms that aren't of interest in an Anti-encyclopedia. They would be in a Undictionary but Uncyclopedia isn't a Undictionary. So it makes no sense to describe those other, mere Undictionary senses of terms in Uncyclopedia articles (unless, somehow it is important to describe those senses in order to clarify the main topic of the article).

Now that that's out of the way, note that while Uncyclopedia is not a Undictionary, our companion project Undictionary is.

Uncyclopedia is not a usage guide

Uncyclopedia is definitely in the business of saying how idioms, etc., are (incorrectly) used. (But, of course, it's often very, very important in the context of an Uncyclopedia article to say just how a word shouldn't be used. E.g., the article on freedom has a long discussion about this.)

Uncyclopedia is not a slang or idiom guide

By a simple extension of the latter, Uncyclopedia is not a hacker/computer usage or other slang and idiom guide. We aren't teaching people how to talk like a hacker or a Cockney chimney-sweep; we're writing an Anti-encyclopedia. We are not Urban Dictonary we have no interest in facts.

Uncyclopedia is not a biographical dictionary

This is especially true in the case of vanity entries. There are special web forums and blogs for this. These tend to focus primarily on calling someone gay or stupid or both. Uncyclopedia is suposed to be funny to all, and as such focuses more on the actions and contributions of people we have heard of. This means that many vanity pages or pages only of interest to users of on particular site may be huffed in exchange for a better-flowing, more funny article.

Amusing biography articles should only be given for people with some sort of achievement. A good measure of achievement is whether someone has been featured in several external sources. Minor characters may of course be mentioned within other articles (e.g. William Hague in the Conservatory Party). While on the one hand we are all certainly delighted that Uncyclopedia is growing in breadth, some (but not all) of us view breadth at the expense of the very notion of what we are working on--an an amusing Anti-encyclopedia--as a bad idea.

See also what Uncyclopedia is not, List of Stubs and Help:Convert a Stub to Undictionary.

External links

• Shallow Page on MeatballWiki