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Feedback discovers Halupedia, an online encyclopedia that is 100 per cent generated by AI, offering such delights as the 19nd century and The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays
By New Scientist
3 June 2026
Josie Ford
Josie Ford
Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
The online encyclopedias are proliferating. While Wikipedia still dominates, there are plenty of others, like the spectacularly nerdy Memory Alpha, which contains all you could ever want to know about Star Trek. Elon Musk has Grokipedia, a partly AI-generated site that purports to correct Wikipedia’s supposed biases, and in doing so is frequently incorrect.
Into this fray enters Halupedia. It is truly unique: it is 100 per cent AI-generated and all of the entries are hallucinations. If you request an article, the site will generate it and then store it indefinitely. Nothing on Halupedia is accurate, except by accident. Hence the site has a page for “The Great Pigeon Census of 1887“, apparently “an ambitious, if ultimately misguided, undertaking by the Royal Society for Avian Enumeration (RSFE) to meticulously count every gold-crested rock dove within the administrative boundaries of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland”.
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Feedback was honestly intrigued by “The Society for the Prevention of Unnecessary Tuesdays“, which aims “to eliminate the occurrence of superfluous Tuesdays, a phenomenon believed by its members to cause significant disruption to the global temporal flow and individual productivity”. We don’t like Tuesdays either: they are our deadline day.
Feedback went on the site and hit the “stumble” button, which creates new pages. The site offered us the “19nd Century“, described as “a unique period in human history, marked by its distinct chronological anomaly”. It “began precisely on the 15th of March, 1888, following the abrupt cessation of the 18nd Century” and ended as abruptly “on the 3rd of November, 1893”.
This is all great fun, but we do want to issue a word of warning. The Halupedia AI appears to have very few guardrails, so some of the entries use extremely offensive language. For context, Feedback thought most of the torrential swearing in The Thick Of It was pretty funny, and we think some of these entries are over the line.
Curious to find out who created the site, we did some digging and found a Reddit account called baderbc, who claims to be the author. They offer this account of the site’s origins: “Long story short: Was drunk with my friend and we built halupedia. Went viral, 150k+ users in a week.” That is a bad way to launch an encyclopedia, but as a way to launch a parody site, it seems as good as any.
An opportunity has presented itself to add a word to the English language, and Feedback is inclined to take it. It comes from reader Neil McKay, who reports that it derives from “a conversation I had with a group of friends four years ago” and apologises for having been “so tardy, even dilatory, in sending it to Feedback”.
Neil highlights the word “onomatopoeia” and its corresponding adjective “onomatopoeic”, which cover words like “boom”, “quack” and “zip” that sound like the thing they describe. But, he says, there is no opposite word. What about words “that sound very unlike the thing they reference”?
One such word, flagged by Neil, is “bucolic”. It means “relating to the countryside” and has overtones of beauty and peace, but the actual sequence of syllables evokes a baby vomiting up milk. Feedback also suggests “pulchritudinous”, which means “beautiful”, but really doesn’t sound like it.
Neil and his friends eventually alighted on “nonomatopoeic” for the adjective. “I believe this neologism deserves to enter the English language, so offer it here for wider dissemination,” he writes.
To verify the originality of this idea, Feedback turned to some search engines. “Nonomatopoeic” returns very few results. Someone called Matt Ballantine coined it in 2016 to refer to “words that sound like they should be onomatopoeic but aren’t”, such as “fungible” – which isn’t quite the same thing. On another blog, a user named patrickfrommemphis used it the way we are using it here, specifically to describe the word “refulgent”, which “sounds nothing like radiance”.
“Nonomatopoeia” is a little more common, with references in The Atlantic, the Sydney Morning Herald and an academic article asking if experimental novels like Ulysses can be properly experienced as audiobooks. However, these are still isolated instances, and they don’t all use the word to mean the same thing.
Feedback therefore calls upon readers to use “nonomatopoeia” in conversation and writing, to drive this neologism forward until the Oxford English Dictionary has no choice but to take us seriously.
We continue our search for the theoretical fourth form of chocolate proposed by reader Toby Pereira (2 May). Unlike milk, white and dark chocolate, which have either cocoa powder or milk or both, this would have neither.
Retired chocolate scientist Peter Archibald writes in to say that a different fourth chocolate already exists. Chocolate company Barry Callebaut “got there before you”, he says. “Ruby chocolate was invented in their laboratories more than 20 years ago… They described it as the fourth type of chocolate, using acidified non-fat cocoa solids from varieties of beans (fermented or not) that deliver a pink hue rather than the dark brown colours of traditional cocoas.”
So, it turns out we are searching for the fifth chocolate.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
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