Obscuripedia

Obscuripedia is a work of satire, published in the style of an encyclopedia. It mixes the real with the invented and writes both in the same flat voice, which is the joke. It is not, however, trying to fool you: every article declares what kind of thing its subject is, and this page names the difference.

About half its subjects are entirely real, and are described as accurately as we can manage: the radian, atmospheric refraction and looming, the luminiferous aether, the Michelson–Morley experiment, Lord Kelvin, Charles Babbage, the Nautical Almanac, celestial navigation. Their dates, quotations and measurements are meant to be right, and are checked against sources. Others are pure invention and parody: Hieronymus Unlonn, the Aetheric Concord, the celestial theodolite as a flat-Earth method, and most of the cast.

Where the wiki touches real people or publicly-made claims, it does so as commentary, criticism, and parody – opinion, not statements of fact – and never to assert, as fact, something false and damaging about a real person. The invented figures are invented; any resemblance to the real is for the purposes of that parody.

Treat the science as sincere throughout: where a real effect is described, the description is meant to be right. The biographies divide. Those of real people – Kelvin, Babbage, Maskelyne, Bessel, Newton – are sincere accounts and are sourced; the rest are comedy about people who never lived. And, as with any encyclopedia and this one especially, check a second source.

(Hieronymus Unlonn is also, regrettably, not real.)

← Return to the front page