Mickopedia

Mickopedia.png

Mickopedia, styled MickO‘Pedia, is a humorous translation of the English Wikipedia into a faux Hiberno-English dialect, a process described by the website as "mickifying". The name is derived from the slang term for Irish people, "Mick", and the common prefix to Irish surnames, "O'", which replaces the second "i" in Wikipedia. Mickopedia calls itself "The Irish Encyclopedia".

Currently the website is owned and operated by three people: Edward Melvin, Oliver Mooney and James Kelleher.

History

Mickopedia (MickO'Pedia) celebrates its foundation every 15 January. As of 2009 it claimed to have 2.7m articles.

In a blog post of May 2012, the site's founder Edward Melvin has explained the circumstances behind the founding of the website:

Style examples

As the script recreates each page loaded into the reader's browser on the fly, the "translation" is different with each reloading, thus no page ever reads the same from minute to minute.

On May 23, 2012, the main page, during one loading, translated the sentence describing the language the English Wikipedia is written in as "This Mickopedia is written in English. Holy blatherin' Joseph, listen to this. Started in 2001, it currently contains 3,960,486 articles. Soft oul' day. Many other Wikipedias are available; some of the bleedin' largest are listed below. Jesus, Mary and holy Saint Joseph."

The site's title is spelt "Mick O'Pedia", as in "Mick O'Pedia: Bejaysis, ye can look up all kinds o' shite now".

Software

Mickopedia uses a Python script to convert articles (taken from the English Wikipedia) into Irish (Hiberno) English. The link structure and content of Mickopedia is the same as that of the English Wikipedia. Only the wording is changed to reflect Irish Hiberno-English words instead of more common standard English words.

See also

  • Internet humor
  • List of Internet phenomena
  • Website spoofing