Encyclopedia Dramatica
Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED or æ; stylized as Encyclopædia Dramatica) is a satirical online community centered around a wiki that acts as a "troll archive". The site hosts racist material and shock content; as a result it was filtered from Google Search in 2010. An administrator of the website was the perpetrator of the 2017 Aztec High School shooting, and users of the site frequently participate in harassment campaigns.
Screenshot Encyclopedia Dramatica's front page on August 6, 2023, with copyrighted elements obscured. | |
Type of site | Wiki, forums and parody |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Owner | .online: Joint Ownership
.com: Sherrod DeGrippo |
| Created by | Sherrod DeGrippo |
| Revenue | Advertising and donations |
| URL | https://encyclopediadramatica.online |
| Commercial | No |
| Registration | Optional (required to edit pages) |
| Launched | .com: December 10, 2004 .ch: April 15, 2011 |
| Current status | Online |
Its articles lampoon topics and current events related or relevant to contemporary internet culture in an encyclopedic fashion. It often serves as a repository of information and a means of discussion for the internet subculture known as Anonymous. Encyclopedia Dramatica celebrates a subversive "NSFW" "trolling culture" and documents internet memes, events such as mass organized pranks; trolling events called "raids", large-scale failures of internet security, and criticism by those within its subculture of other internet communities which are accused of self-censorship in order to garner positive coverage from traditional and established media outlets. The site hosts numerous pornographic images, along with content that is misogynistic, racist, anti-Semitic, islamophobic, and homophobic.
On April 14, 2011, the original URL of the site was redirected to a new website named "Oh Internet" that bore little resemblance to Encyclopedia Dramatica. Parts of the ED community harshly criticized the changes. On the night of the Encyclopedia Dramatica shutdown, regular ED visitors bombarded the 'Oh Internet' Facebook wall with hate messages. The Web Ecology Project published a downloadable archive of Encyclopedia Dramatica's content the next day. Besides this archive, fan-made torrents and several mirrors of the original site were subsequently generated. Based on these archives, the site has repeatedly gone offline and come back under new domain names, with the website currently being hosted at encyclopediadramatica.online. Between 2013 and 2019, the website was hosted under various top level domains: .rs, .ch, .es, and .se, with each domain bearing the second-level domain "encyclopediadramatica".