It's on the internet so it must be true!

June 16, 2010 9:29 AM

Wikipedia too credible for your liking? You need to spend some time in Fictopedia, the fictional encyclopedia. Learn about the totally fake adventure game Schmaxilla, the nonexistent Norswedish beat poet Arnis Radis, and the entirely fabricated but still controversial Spirit Displacement Device! Then create a free account and add your own plausible untruths to the canon. [via mefi projects]

In case you missed it, there are more lies told with a completely straight face for your enjoyment, previously on MetaFilter (unrelated).

posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis (45 comments total)

Sounds like a smaller and better-kempt Uncyclopedia.
posted by The White Hat at 9:35 AM on June 16, 2010

I wanted to FPP this but couldn't figure out how to search for anything, since they're all made-up things and I don't know what to search for.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:36 AM on June 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

A conversation between two melons

The slam poet Arnis Radis composed the winning call and response lines in 1990 at the World Spice Beatbox Championship in Pensacola, winning $10,000.

"Honeydew?" "Honeydon't." "Honeydid!" "Honeydaaaaaaaaaam!"

I think I like this place.
posted by verb at 9:37 AM on June 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

shakespeherian: "I wanted to FPP this but couldn't figure out how to search for anything, since they're all made-up things and I don't know what to search for."

Use the random function, follow a few links around to get the gist of the immediate "continuity" (such as it is) and begin making stuff up.
posted by charred husk at 9:43 AM on June 16, 2010

Borges would approve, in fict he does.
posted by emhutchinson at 9:44 AM on June 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

Oh man. What if I made a new page for "the case for invading Iraq"? Or put up a wholesale copy of the Wikipedia section on Scientology doctrine?

The snark potential is unlimited!!
posted by rkent at 9:47 AM on June 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

If they keep saying it's false, it always will bea


or, was anyone else's first thought, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis tertius! Acckkk!"?
posted by Some1 at 9:47 AM on June 16, 2010

Fun! For a while, I toyed with the idea of creating a wiki of improbable zoology but it never left the conversation over beer stage.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 9:49 AM on June 16, 2010

a wiki of improbable zoology

Googling Dougal Dixon found me the speculative evolution wiki. Not a lot there, though.
posted by DU at 9:53 AM on June 16, 2010

This is fucking awesome, I can't wait to start contributing.
posted by Think_Long at 9:57 AM on June 16, 2010

Wikipedia too credible for your liking?

Yes, yes it is.
posted by thewittyname at 9:59 AM on June 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Already been done.
posted by chasing at 9:59 AM on June 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

After reading the first sentence I was sure you would be linking to Conservapedia.
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:00 AM on June 16, 2010

We really need to work on the previewing skills.
posted by nestor_makhno at 10:01 AM on June 16, 2010 [7 favorites]

Can a Monkey Do My Job? is a reality television show format produced in many countries throughout the world. In each episode of the show, a participant is replaced by a monkey, usually a great ape, at his or her job for one week.

I hope someone got fired for that one.
posted by DU at 10:04 AM on June 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

a wiki of improbable zoology

Hypothetical types of biochemistry on Wikipedia
posted by lukemeister at 10:05 AM on June 16, 2010

> Schmaxilla follows the the protagonist, a sharpshooting cybernetic swashbuckler named Axil, on a quest to rescue the Orange Key from the forces of Dark Tremor who wishes to use its strato-scientific power force to unlock the mysteries of the universe- and harness them for Zoastrian villainy. Axil's main weapon consists of launching his own shoulder blades, which can be augmented with a variety of power-ups.

I don't know if this is funnier because it's ludicrous, or because it sounds like a plausible computer game. Or because it's both.
posted by ardgedee at 10:05 AM on June 16, 2010

Come on guys, if we pull together, we can get college students plagiarizing it for term papers within a couple of months on the outside.
posted by Salvor Hardin at 10:10 AM on June 16, 2010 [2 favorites]

I can't wait until there are edit wars between two users going back and forth over the validity of a fake fact.
posted by yeti at 10:23 AM on June 16, 2010 [4 favorites]

Okay, I'm re-writing history with this. The U.S. lost the Cold War, for one, and the U.S.S.R. swallowed North America to form the United Territories of the Soviet Bloc.

This will keep me entertained forever.
posted by reductiondesign at 10:24 AM on June 16, 2010

Oh fine. There goes my afternoon productivity.
posted by kinnakeet at 10:24 AM on June 16, 2010

MAD POLITICAL SCIENCE

so this is basically the best thing ever.
posted by The Whelk at 10:36 AM on June 16, 2010

Go at it.
posted by ShawnString at 10:40 AM on June 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Wow, out of my 5 clicks of the random button, two were made up folk singers and two were crap science that sorta described major plot elements of certain episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Me like.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:49 AM on June 16, 2010

Intriguing!
posted by lyam at 10:52 AM on June 16, 2010

So, if the pages are all fiction, doesn't the one for Cabal rather imply that in reality...

And, how do they know?!

Wouldn't surprise me if the founders turn out to be called Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale. Cybersatire: it's how they control us.
posted by titus-g at 10:59 AM on June 16, 2010

Where's the long horse entry?
posted by exhilaration at 11:33 AM on June 16, 2010

This has the potential to be far more fun than Wikipedia.
posted by him at 11:35 AM on June 16, 2010

Fun facts:

The Fictopedia has already eclipsed all other sites on the Web for page clicks and ad revenue.* Server farms for the new venture have eaten up every available bit of real estate on the Atlantis Seaboard, causing a new housing surge that is fuelling the area's economic comeback. Officials at the UN Fusion Research Facility have had their funding tripled in order to make fusion reactor development possible by the end of the year, in order to ease the growing demand that Fictopedia servers make on Atlantis' power grid.

AMD and Intel have for the first time ever teamed up to provide increased production of processors to fuel Fictopedia's growth.* This year's production runs will be a donation to the fledgling enterprise. "Profits can wait," said the media-shy Intel CEO Paul Otellini. "I'm also donating all of my salary to Fictopedia until we've met all their funding and supply needs." It is rumored that Larry Ellison has anonymously donated all of the back-end database software, and has offered his private jet for all flights in to Atlantis headquarters.*

Led by the always-punctual developers at 3D Realms*, a crack team of programmers from Best Buy University has been collaborating via Gopher to accelerate the streamlining of code for the world's most-used website. It is believed they are using a combination of Ruby and Visual Basic 5.0.*

Fictopedia has already changed the English language. Its online search has now become the de facto way to find internet information, and the prhase 'Fict It Up!' has replaced 'Just Google It'.* The existence of its soon-to-be-released video archive has already resulted in Chad Hurley disbanding YouTube and retiring to race go-karts.*

Jimmy Wales is apparently planning a rival Star Wars fanfiction database, WookiePedia, and has reportedly fired all top Wikipedia administrators who have creative arts in order to staff the new venture.* George Lucas has been tasked to write the introductory content.*

*Citation needed.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 11:38 AM on June 16, 2010

Hey guys, I'm completely thrilled that you're all on board with Fictopedia, I'm already seeing tons of entries and new accounts!

As I said in the initial projects post, the idea is to allow any sort of fictional content, from serious to silly and in any genre. Its my hope that as people find a particularly cool article they start to expand on it and create a universe around it. The idea is generate cool/interesting/funny/compelling content for fictional worlds by starting from the ground up, rather than from someone's show/novel/movie down.

But just to differentiate from Uncyclopedia (which I learned about after I'd been doing this for a while already), Fictopedia does not confine itself to being lies about the real world (or parodies etc). Those certainly have a place, but I like to think about ficts as true facts about fictional worlds. In my long run vision, some of these clusters of articles would get well developed and compelling enough that someone might be inspired to use them as source material for a book/show/comic/etc. That's down the road, though. For now, I just want people to create and expand.

Also, I recently made a twitter account for Fictopedia so that I can send out announcements about cool articles that I think would be a good seed for expansion. You can follow it at www.twitter.com/fictopedia

Anyway, I am really humbled that so many of you like the project and are contributing already. Keep at it!
posted by syntaxbad at 12:05 PM on June 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

> Jimmy Wales is apparently planning a rival Star Wars fanfiction database, WookiePedia

Wookieepedia
Wookieepedia
Wookieepedia
posted by ardgedee at 12:26 PM on June 16, 2010

I'm just waiting for people's grandmas to start emailing them things from this, thinking that they are true.
posted by matildaben at 1:03 PM on June 16, 2010

ardgedee: "Wookieepedia"

The great tragedy of sciencesnark - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
posted by Hardcore Poser at 1:38 PM on June 16, 2010

This is delightfully Borgesian, and it reminds me of the RPG Lexicon (previously), which I only recently discovered. Does anyone still play Lexicon?
posted by Stove at 1:56 PM on June 16, 2010

Neat!
posted by robocop is bleeding at 2:02 PM on June 16, 2010

I'd play some lexicon if people got a game going, never heard of it until just now. It sounds tedious and pointless, aka super fun
posted by Think_Long at 2:05 PM on June 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

Nano-Verts, colloquially known as brainvertising, are biodegradable, nano-scale devices, that bond to neurons in the human brain, resulting in the involuntary formation of pre-fabricated, marketing-oriented memories and preferences. Developed by the Axon Gemini Blue Corporation (AGB), the technology has proved wildly popularWhile the memories fade within a few hours, they do have the effect of inducing the overwhelming urge to bring up the product in conversation, regardless of situation.

Man, that reminds me: I've got to get me some of that Axon Gemini Blue shaving cream. For a smooth shave and a manly odor, choose Axon Gemini Blue shaving cream!
posted by notswedish at 3:24 PM on June 16, 2010

What about Conservapedia, I don't have a link (because there is longer any way to link to it on the intern-net you neeed a bulliten board to link to it), but since no one mentioned it here [citiation not needed] if you google Conservapedia it doesn 't show up; this first happened six weeks after it was created when Wiki-Pedia, and WookApedia first split (George Lucas and Jimmy wales got in a fight over the addition of THX 1138 into EVERY ARTICLE) when it was first created it was basically a bastion of Liberal Ideology, and it was the founding Whales that were able to Breach the Beach, and bring the Tide of Bright clothes, and color-fast technology into adoption by almost all local adoption agencies.

It has been said that george Lucas is a psychic, since he created THX 1138 like a hundred years ago, and it wasn't until many years later that it would be realized that there are 1138 federal marital benefits and protections denied to same-sex couples as the result of marriage inequality.

Metafilter's own invented the internet, and told the world about this groups efforts to raise awareness that separate isn't really equal, despite there being a ban on talking about the creation of a SLIDERS* wikipedia side project (*same earth; different dimension).
Which brings us back to the similarities between Conservapedia and Fictopedia.

(the attention to detail in this article, and promise to be Biased is in dispute; perhaps you could add some more bias to this article, keep the inclusion of real world material to a minimum as per-guidelines in mind when writing ficts) 1, 000 000 000, BC, 2017, 5:00 O'clock, PM in the morning Eastern time

I bet you don't know about the Ae'rs... they are the spearhead of an effort to return to using those really cool Ae, and Oe and similar symbols, like you may have used to see often used to spell things like Foederal, Foetus, Aether and such.
posted by infinite intimation at 4:41 PM on June 16, 2010

This thing will collapse under the weight of it's own timeline continuity disorders at 16 hundred o'clock on October 14 2121; unfortunately, by that time it will already be too late to back up all the cool data that it is holding. Humans go into an ice age for the next five years, and Ketchup becomes the currency of bartering; all we have left are copies of Geocities sites from Archive .org... the resulting evolutionary loss of fine-scale eye-ball powered vision leads to people having less ability to see the lung-fish 2.0 as they wade into shore and attack with beveled AND rounded shapes. flash animation survives the end. 20 billion years later alien archaeologists come along, and think that we were a species that lived in the Aether, between the electrons and the magnetic 4ce Jpeg Art; they believe that we went out of business because we could no longer handle the difficulty of our lives and we gave up due to the difficulties of navigation around our flash based website homes. -- in reality we went extinct because AXE body spray is 100% toxic to human beings' Aether based spirits, the abundance of Dudes spraying AXE everywhere causes the implosion of human cells, and eventually the destruction of all humans on earth; this is a relief to us, we live on earth 2, unbeknownst to us. but it gives us a leg up in the galactic-three legged race category of the 'universe-a-limpix', we end up boycotting it (said Gnome Chomskii, Linux based life-form, and politician, "It's all become too commercial for us, man")

My point is that this place is Bad news Man! Can't you read how it is actually going to be our down-fall (not the you-tube remix kind EIther)
posted by infinite intimation at 5:06 PM on June 16, 2010

Part of me wants to be all grand and say that I helped to create this with Syntaxbad, but I didn't. This was all his brainchild and I was just lucky enough to be the first content-creator. But as far as that goes, I'd like to link to some of the bits that I created so that others may hopefully expand. Here's the best jumping-off point.
posted by Navelgazer at 7:46 PM on June 16, 2010

Just to clarify the gist behind the project, especially with respect to some of the comments comparing it to Conservapedia, the main goal of Fictopedia is to create ever expanding and more detailed fictional worlds. As I understand it, Conservapedia is like Uncyclopedia in that its main goal is to satire the real world. There are certainly plenty of silly real-world satire articles to be found on Fictopedia, but I want to stress that it is also a place for serious world building for those so inclined.

I'm extremely excited to see how many people have joined up and are contribution. My thought was that at a certain threshold, it would become self-sustaining, as each article inspires others to expand on it, and those expansions in turn get expanded and linked in creative ways.

Also, I'm aware that as far as organization, page design, and wiki settings monkeying go, it could really use some work. I've got several ideas for things that could be modified or added in the future, but feel free to drop by the Discussion Section of the Main Page to add your thoughts (or volunteer your mad tech skills!)
posted by syntaxbad at 8:23 PM on June 16, 2010

Welcome to the Oakland Mystical Nexus.
posted by Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey at 8:47 PM on June 16, 2010

opps, I was only referring to the fictal and fractured, tortured nature of some "conservative" 'beliefs' on Conservapedia (is it real? or a spoof?) and at the same have a laugh with the several posters links to conservapedia. Didn't mean to direct or suggest how fictopedia would best be used (I was aiming to create a man-made-recursive-untrue, but-factual, in-a-fictional-universe, information-loop that I was seeing if I could create - by tying my Non-Fict, to the actually posted links to Conservipedia- I did it[citation needed]). My words were a Fict... of a fict... or a Fictal Fractal if you will; speaking of which, is there a Fictal fractal article yet?

That was some dark times when the first person discovered that a Fictal fractal could be used for good and not so good purposes, and to mass produce magic eye books.

Science of the 2120's proved that the intimation's quest to create a man-made loopy-linky meta:fictal, to make a singularity just doesn't actually work, and just looks clumsy. Sufficiently advanced jokes are in fact now scientifically proven to be eminently distinguishable from magic.
(I like your project a lot, thank you for sharing with the net!:) Very creative project, much opportunity for interesting things happening there, my dismay, and worry were solely products of my new found desire to speak in ye-olde-fict!
posted by infinite intimation at 9:55 PM on June 16, 2010

No worries! Glad you enjoy the project. Fictal Fractals sound like the sort of thing a Trans-Fictional Vessel would get caught in if they didn't plot their thematic vectors properly.
posted by syntaxbad at 11:45 AM on June 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Fictopedia I can understand.

Conservapedia breaks my postmodern irony detection algorithms. I can't tell if it's real or fake. If it's fake, I fear for the mental stability of the creators.
posted by lodurr at 11:52 AM on June 17, 2010 [1 favorite]