Content
Encyclopædia Dramatica was founded in 2004 by Sherrod DeGrippo, also known by the online pseudonym "Girlvinyl". DeGrippo found 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 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. DeGrippo created Encyclopedia Dramatica in order to "house some information from livejournal and some drama about hackers Theo DeRaadt and Darren Reed."
Encyclopedia Dramatica characterized itself as being "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 4chan's /b/, a notorious Internet imageboard. Encyclopædia 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 comes from "every pocket of the Web", 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 Encyclopædia Dramatica's own forum members). These are derided in a manner described variously as "coarse", "offensive", "obscene", "irreverent, obtuse, politically incorrect", "crude but hilarious", and "crude and abusive". 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."
Articles at Encyclopædia Dramatica are notably critical of MySpace as well as users on YouTube, LiveJournal, DeviantART, and Wikipedia. In The New York Times Magazine, journalist Jonathan Dee described it as a "snarky Wikipedia anti-fansite". 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." 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." This coverage of Internet jargon and memes had been acknowledged in the New Statesman, on Language Log, in C't magazine, and in Wired magazine.
According to Sherrod DeGrippo,
As long as something wasn’t submitted as illegal or an abuse complaint, I didn’t even see it. Wikis are something that you either closely, closely monitor and manage, or you just let it go.
On December 8, 2010, Encyclopædia 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.
Garrett E. Moore, the operator of a fork of Encyclopædia Dramatica located at encyclopediadramatica.se (encyclopediadramatica.ch at the time), told an interviewer for The Daily Dot,
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 replied by saying,
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 later interview with The Daily Dot, Moore defended his community's belief in free speech.
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