The site hosts racist material and shocking content; as a result, it was filtered from Google Search in 2010. The website's articles lampoon topics and current events related or relevant to contemporary internet culture in an encyclopedic fashion.
It also serves as a repository of information and a means of discussion for the Hacker group known as Anonymous. Encyclopedia Dramatica celebrates its subversive "NSFW" "troll site 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 to garner positive coverage from traditional and established media outlets. The site hosts numerous pornographic images, along with content that is misogynist, racist, antisemitic, 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. Between 2013 and 2024, the website was hosted under various top-level domains such as;
As of October 2024, the only active mirror of ED is edramatica.com.
Encyclopedia Dramatica was founded in 2004 by Sherrod DeGrippo, also known by the online pseudonym "Girlvinyl". DeGrippo joined LiveJournal in 2000 and became enthralled by the behavior of some of its members;
People were accessible and it was bidirectional. Voyeurs and exhibitionists were able to interact in a way that was normalized. That's why I started ED. It was mostly just personalities that were just so nuts and fascinating.
She became involved in the "LJdrama" community, which covered stories on Live Journal gossip. When the community was banned from Live Journal, they created their website. In 2002, two Live Journal users, Joshua Williams (aka mediacrat) and Andrewpants, became intimately involved with each other. After they broke off their relationship, LJdrama decided to document the resulting drama. Unflattering photographs of Williams were spread on the web, and Williams considered this harassment. He threatened legal action, traveled to Portland, Oregon, to speak to Live Journal's abuse team, and reported the alleged harassment to a local TV news station. DeGrippo created Encyclopedia Dramatica to "house some information from Live Journal and some drama about hackers Theo de Raadt and Darren Reed".
Encyclopedia Dramatica was "In the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary." The New York Times Magazine recognized the wiki as "an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore" that it labeled a "troll archive". C't, a European magazine for IT professionals noted the site's role in introducing newcomers to the culture of /b/, a notorious Internet imageboard at 4chan. Encyclopedia Dramatica defines trolling in terms of doing things "for the lulz" (for laughs), a phrase that it qualifies as "a catchall explanation for any trolling you do".
The targets of this trolling come from "every pocket of the web", including not only the non-corporeal aspects of internet phenomena, (e.g., online catchphrases, fan pages, forums, and viral phenomena) but also real people like mature celebrities, identifiable internet drama participants and even Encyclopedia Dramatic's Forum members. These are derided in a manner described variously as;
The material is presented to appear comprehensive, with extensive use of shock-value prose, drawings, photographs, and the like. The emotional response is then added to the articles, often in a similarly derogatory or inflammatory manner with the purpose of provoking further emotional response. Adherents of practice assert that visitors to the website "shouldn't take anything said on Dramatica seriously".
Articles at Encyclopedia Dramatica were particularly critical of MySpace, as well as users on YouTube, LiveJournal, DeviantART, Tumblr, and Wikipedia.
In March 2010, "Joseph Evers" was recognized as the owner by ABC News, reporting on the site being blacklisted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) contacted Evers threatening him with charges under Australian law.
On December 8, 2010, Encyclopedia Dramatica deleted its article on Operation Payback. On the same day, Facebook deleted its Operation Payback page, and Twitter suspended Operation Payback's account. An anonymous source told Gawker that the Encyclopedia Dramatica article was deleted as the result of court orders.
DeGrippo reportedly "came to hate" Encyclopedia Dramatica. She had hoped that ED would return to its roots and focus on LiveJournal drama. Furthermore, according to her, Encyclopedia Dramatica never turned a profit during the time she owned it, due to its content pulling off advertisers.
On April 14, 2011, the URL encyclopediadramatica.com was redirected to "Oh Internet", an entirely different safe-to-work website that DeGrippo had created. The name "Oh Internet" is meant to convey, "Oh Internet, you are so crazy". DeGrippo stated that "Shock for shock's sake is old at this point [...]". Some regular users of Encyclopedia Dramatica were displeased by the change and attacked the website's official Facebook fan page with hate messages and pornography.
In a question and answer session at the ROFLCon summit in October 2011, DeGrippo was asked why Encyclopedia Dramatica was closed and replaced with On Internet. She replied: "We were unable to stop the degradation of the content. It just kept getting longer and longer and dumber and dumber and less and less coherent over time". She also explained why she had not released the site as an archive, saying that she "didn't want to", and suggestions that this would have made her personally responsible for any DMCA and privacy violations that it contained. She also stated that hosting Encyclopedia Dramatica caused her to have trouble involving the FBI.
From April 2011, Ryan Cleary hosted a fork of Encyclopedia Dramatica at encyclopediadramatica.ch. Members of this project gathered text and images from Google's Web Cache and other backups, and a script was created to upload cached information. On June 21, 2011, Scotland Yard arrested Ryan Cleary based on alleged connections to online attacks on Sony. The arrest temporarily disrupted the operation of the wiki, but other members were able to resume their duties.
Garrett E. Moore later became the fork's owner. Moore reported difficulties in securing a host for the website. On March 19, 2012, encyclopediadramatica.ch was shut down for a short time due to a "DNS block". On March 21, 2012, the site moved to a Swedish domain name, encyclopediadramatica.se, instead of a domain in Switzerland as before. The site's Facebook account later addressed the block, stating that it was because "we don't keep up our end of the nic.ch user agreement contract stating that we had to keep a mailing address and phone number in Switzerland".
Moore told an interviewer for The Daily Dot in July 2011:
People take themselves too seriously, they can't laugh at anything. We make fun of everything. I make fun of skinny white computer nerds, but I am one.
When asked about "abusive content", Moore stated that he removes it when he sees it, then further explained:
I'm not going to leave a 14-year-old girl's address up on a page cause some dipshit got mad at her and made an article. But if you dress up like a fox and wear diapers and then take pictures of it? That's fair game, sir.
In a September 2011 interview with The Daily Dot, Moore defended his community's belief in free speech.
In January 2013, a video game created by user "gizmo01942" came to the attention of the media. The game, Bullet to the Head of the NRA, was controversial because the player could take aim and shoot at members of the National Rifle Association of America. In February 2015, Muhammad Sex Simulator 2015, another video game by the same user, attracted further controversy because of the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting.
On December 7, 2017, 21-year-old William Atchison opened fire at a high school in Aztec, New Mexico, killing two before committing suicide. Atchison had been a site admin on Encyclopedia Dramatica (posting under the name AlGore) and had an obsession with mass shootings.
The website received mainstream media attention after Jason Fortuny and Encyclopedia Dramatica posted photographs, emails, and phone numbers from 176 responses to a Craiglist advertisement he posted in 2006, in which he posed as a woman seeking sexual encounters with dominant men. The incident was addressed in a blog hosted at Wired News, where the blogger proposes that Encyclopedia Dramatica may be the "world's lamest wiki".
Julian Dibbell, in Wired, described Encyclopedia Dramatica as the site "where the vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: flamingly racist, homophobic and misogynistic content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend." The site is also known for its pervasive clickbait advertisements, in addition to its having almost none of the rules expected in other similar communities. Ninemsn described Encyclopedia Dramatica as
Wikipedia's evil twin. It's a site where almost every article is biased, offensive, unsourced, and without the faintest trace of political correctness. A search through its archives will reveal animated images of people committing suicide, articles glorifying extreme racism and sexism, and a seemingly endless supply of twisted, shocking views on just about every major human tragedy in history.
In 2006, "a well-known band of trolls" emailed Encyclopedia Dramatica's creator, DeGrippo, demanding edits to the protected (i.e. locked) article describing them. After she refused to do so, the trolls ordered taxis, pizzas, and escort services, and sent death threats and threats of rape to DeGrippo's apartment.
Encyclopedia Dramatica became a "favorite target for critics, who accuse Anonymous of propagating hate," for allowing alleged members of the group to sometimes use the website as a platform. Through this association, Encyclopedia Dramatica received incidental coverage when actions by members of Anonymous led to the arrest of an alleged pedophile, when they demonstrated against Scientology in London; when a member of the group broke into the e-mail account of former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, and when a member of Anonymous claimed credit for an attack on the virtual Second Life headquarters of former presidential candidate John Edwards. The convergence of Encyclopedia Dramatica with the anti-Scientology campaign of Project Chanology was noted by technology journalist Julian Dibbell.