Book of Woo Wiki

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On July 29 2013, in celebration of the 500th strip of the webcomic Sandra and Woo (http://www.sandraandwoo.com/), author Oliver Knörzer (aka Novil) and artist Puri Andini (Powree) produced a special strip in which the title character, Woo (a raccoon) had written a story, with a surprising twist. The resulting document, as presented to the readers, was four pages full of dramatic illustrations and text apparently written in a strange language with a unique alphabet. As much a work of art as a puzzle, deciphering the text was presented as a challenge to the readers (including a cash prize).

Inspired at least in part by the Voynich Manuscript, Novil has stated that the text itself is a real story, and was created by way of an encryption process which can theoretically be reversed to obtain something close to the original (English or German) text. To date, however, despite many attempts, nobody has been able to crack the code, and Woo's masterpiece remains unread by human eyes.

The title of the strip, and how the text itself has come to be known, is "The Book of Woo". This wiki has been put together originally by foogod in 2014 in an effort to provide a central collaboration space for any and all interested in helping to decipher this work. Feel free to contribute your theories!

Narga (talk) 17:09, 28 February 2018 (CET)

Latest News[edit]

June 28, 2018Solution to Book of Woo revealed!

Today Novil revealed the original English text of the Book of Woo and explained the encryption process.

June 25, 2018 — mi tawa

With today's filler comic Novil gave the biggest hint so far that the Book of Woo makes use of the artificial language "Toki Pona". The user ratfox already uploaded a transliteration of the text in this language, derived by simple substitution from nneonneo's transliteration which was already amazingly close to the real thing. He later also added a word-by-word translation to English. Now it seems we're almost done! It only remains to reconstruct the story from this simplified version. There are several online translators for Toki Pona available if you want to try translating it yourself. -- Narga (talk)

March 08, 2018 — Missing a few entries?

I just realized that the time of the backup from which this new wiki was created was probably a few months before the actual shutdown of the old wiki. So a few of the latest contributions to the old wiki might have been lost. If you contributed or remember anything that is now missing, please add it again. -- Narga (talk)

February 28, 2018 — New Wiki

Welcome to the new wiki which is currently mostly a cleaned up copy of the old one, originally created by foogod. Most content of the old wiki could be migrated here thanks to a backup by Oliver Knörzer himself. -- Narga (talk)

July 23, 2014 — Spam Issues

Novil's recent link to the wiki has brought some new contributors (welcome!) but also a bunch of spammers. I've gone through and deleted/blocked a bunch of spam users/edits from the past couple of days, and will be adding additional countermeasures over the next few days. I tried to be fairly careful, but if you find anything that was deleted/blocked which shouldn't have been, please let me know. -- Foogod

April 27, 2014 — Artwork Interpretation available

Created a page with interpretation attempts of the artwork by various readers. -- Foogod

April 18, 2014 — It is now possible to include Book of Woo glyphs in wiki pages!

See Using Wootext for more information on how to do this. -- Foogod

April 17, 2014 — New transliteration and OpenType font available

Foogod has proposed a new transliteration mapping, with a corresponding font file. -- Foogod

April 13, 2014 — The Book of Woo Wiki is now live!

Welcome, everyone! -- Foogod

Wiki Starting Points[edit]

  • Getting Started -- Summary of important information to get you started.
  • Links and Resources -- Where to find the originals, discussions, tools, and other useful stuff elsewhere on the net.
  • What We Know -- What we know to be true about the encrypted text, what is generally assumed, what is suspected, and what is currently confused or questionable.
  • Transliterations -- Copies of various commonly-used transliterations of the original text into another alphabet/character-set (for easy manipulation, reference, quoting, etc).
  • Analytical Results -- Results people have obtained from analyzing the text in various ways.
  • Working Theories -- A place to note various people's current theories and lines of investigation.
  • Artwork Interpretation -- A place for collecting thoughts/speculations/interpretations of the imagery found in the book's artwork.
  • Work Organization -- A place where we are trying to organize what we already checked and what we need to check.