Dramatica Book
Mertie Oldow
Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED or ;[5] stylized as Encyclopdia Dramatica)[6][7] is an online community centered around a wiki[8] that acts as a "troll archive".[9] The site hosts racist material[10] and shock content; as a result it was filtered from Google Search in 2010.[11] An administrator of the website was the perpetrator of the 2017 Aztec High School shooting,[12] and users of the site frequently participate in harassment campaigns.[13]
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.[14] Encyclopedia Dramatica celebrates a subversive "NSFW" "trolling culture"[15][16] 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, antisemitic, islamophobic and homophobic.[17]
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.[18] On the night of the Encyclopedia Dramatica shutdown, regular ED visitors bombarded the 'Oh Internet' Facebook wall with hate messages.[19] The Web Ecology Project published a downloadable archive of Encyclopedia Dramatica's content the next day.[20][21] Besides this archive, fan-made torrents and several mirrors of the original site were subsequently generated.[22] Based on these archives, the site has repeatedly gone offline and come back under new domain names. Between 2013 and 2020, the website was hosted under various top level domains: .rs, .ch, .es, .se,[23] .wiki, and .online, with each domain bearing the second-level domain "encyclopediadramatica".[24][25]
Encyclopedia Dramatica was founded in 2004 by Sherrod DeGrippo, also known by the online pseudonym "Girlvinyl".[3][9] 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.[26]
She became involved in the LJdrama community, which covered stories on LiveJournal gossip. When the community was banned from LiveJournal, they created their own website. In 2002, two LiveJournal 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 to be harassment. He threatened legal action, traveled to Portland, Oregon, in order to speak to LiveJournal's abuse team, and reported the alleged harassment to a local TV news station.[27] DeGrippo created Encyclopedia Dramatica in order to "house some information from livejournal and some drama about hackers Theo de Raadt and Darren Reed."[25]
Encyclopedia Dramatica characterized itself as being "In the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary."[3] The New York Times Magazine recognized the wiki as "an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore"[9] that it labeled a "troll archive".[9] 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.[28] Encyclopedia Dramatica defines trolling in terms of doing things "for the lulz" (for laughs),[29] a phrase that it qualifies as "a catchall explanation for any trolling you do."[29]
The targets of this trolling come from "every pocket of the Web",[30] to include not only the non-corporeal aspects of Internet phenomena, (e.g. online catchphrases, fan pages, forums and viral phenomena), but also real people (e.g. amateur celebrities, identifiable internet drama participants and even Encyclopedia Dramatica's own forum members).[30][31][32] These are derided in a manner described variously as "coarse", "offensive", "obscene",[33][34] "irreverent, obtuse, politically incorrect",[35] "crude but hilarious",[30] and "crude and abusive".[36] The material is presented to appear comprehensive, with extensive use of shock-value prose, drawings, photographs and the like. The emotional responses are then added to the articles, often in similarly derogatory or inflammatory manner, with the purpose of provoking further emotional response. Adherents of the practice assert that visitors to the website "shouldn't take anything said on Dramatica seriously."[35]
Articles at Encyclopedia Dramatica were particularly critical of MySpace[33] as well as users on YouTube, LiveJournal, DeviantART, Tumblr and Wikipedia. In The New York Times Magazine, journalist Jonathan Dee described it as a "snarky Wikipedia anti-fansite".[31] Shaun Davies of Australia's Nine Network called it "Wikipedia's bastard child, a compendium of internet trends and culture which lampoons every subject it touches."[35] The site "is run like Wikipedia, but its style is the opposite; most of its information is biased and opinionated, not to mention racist, homophobic, and spiteful, but on the upside its snide attitude makes it spot-on about most Internet memes it covers."[37] This coverage of Internet jargon and memes had been acknowledged in the New Statesman,[38] on Language Log,[39] in C't magazine,[28] and in Wired magazine.[30]
Predating sites like the former Cheezburger Network (now known as Know Your Meme) by several years, Encyclopedia Dramatica was the first encyclopedia dedicated to the memes and "mean-spirited trolling"[41] of 4chan culture.[42]
On December 8, 2010, Encyclopedia Dramatica deleted its article on Operation Payback.[43] On the same day, Facebook deleted its Operation Payback page, and Twitter suspended Operation Payback's account.[44] An anonymous source told Gawker that the Encyclopedia Dramatica article was deleted as the result of court orders.[43]
In June 2020 it was reported by Canary Mission that Andrew "weev" Auernheimer is both the ".mw-parser-output .monospacedfont-family:monospace,monospaceweev" who "Zoombombed" a March 2020 chat for Jewish teens, and the "Joseph Evers" who owned and co-created the 2010 instance of ED and who has been wanted by the Australian Human Rights Commission since.[45][46]
DeGrippo reportedly "came to hate" Encyclopedia Dramatica.[47] She had hoped that ED would return to its roots and focus on LiveJournal drama.[48] Furthermore, according to her, Encyclopedia Dramatica never turned a profit during the time she owned it, due to its content putting off advertisers.[49]
On April 14, 2011, the URL encyclopediadramatica.com was redirected to "Oh Internet",[18] an entirely different safe-for-work website that DeGrippo had created.[18][50] The name "Oh Internet" is meant to convey "Oh, Internet, you are so crazy!"[47] 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[19] with "hate messages and pornography".[18]
In a question and answer session at the ROFLCon summit in October 2011, DeGrippo was asked why Encyclopedia Dramatica was closed and replaced with Oh 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."[51] She also explained why she had not released the site as an archive, saying that she "didn't want to", and suggesting that this would have made her personally responsible for any DMCA and privacy violations that it contained.[52] She also stated that hosting Encyclopedia Dramatica caused her to have troubles involving the FBI.[53]
From April 2011,[54] Ryan Cleary hosted a fork of Encyclopedia Dramatica at encyclopediadramatica.ch.[24][55] 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.[24] On June 21, 2011, Scotland Yard arrested Ryan Cleary based on alleged connections to online attacks on Sony.[56][57] The arrest temporarily disrupted operation of the wiki, but other members were able to resume Cleary's duties.[24]
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, at 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 didn'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."[59]
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.[24]
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.[60] In February 2015, Muhammad Sex Simulator 2015, another video game by the same user, attracted further controversy because of the recent Charlie Hebdo shooting.[61]
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.[12]
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