ENCYCLOPEDIA DRAMATICA▊
A wiki started in 2004 to catalog LiveJournal slap-fights turned into the closest thing internet trolling ever had to a national archive. For most of a decade it was where the raids, the memes, and the word "lulz" got written down — a deliberately vile, shock-for-shock encyclopedia that a generation of /b/ treated as its own institutional memory. Then in 2011 its own founder tried to shut it down and replace it with a clean, advertiser-safe version. The users burned the reboot to the ground, rebuilt the original from Google's cache, and have kept it limping from one country-code domain to the next ever since. Nobody could agree whether it was a museum or a crime scene. It was both, on purpose.
We archive the side of social media that news sites don't. The personal interactions, the users… I think it is very important to archive these events.
Brian Zaiger, an Encyclopedia Dramatica operator, describing what the site exists to do — to Vice, 2016
- WHAT
- Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED) — satirical MediaWiki chronicling internet drama, memes, and trolling; launched December 2004 FACT
- FOUNDER
- Sherrod DeGrippo — handle "Girlvinyl," out of the LiveJournal-drama community LJdrama FACT
- THE DRAMA
- The self-styled troll canon — it documented Anonymous raids (Habbo Hotel), codified the memes, and wrote down the "lulz" lexicon; a deliberately shock-register wiki
- THE TURN
- April 14, 2011: Girlvinyl redirects ED to the sanitized "Oh Internet." The community revolts, forks the wiki, and keeps it alive as a domain nomad (.ch, .rs, .se, .wiki, .online…)
- STATUS
- CONTESTED — still online in a later iteration; still fighting over hosting, money, and libel. It named the era and archived it, and it hurt real people doing it
This file documents ED as an institution and its own long-running drama — the founding, the reboot revolt, the fork, the hosting and legal battles. It does not reproduce ED's shock content, its slurs, or the private data it published, and it does not name or re-visit the individuals ED targeted. The through-line is a site that made itself the memory of trolling culture, then survived a hostile takeover by its own creator, and has been arguing about what it is ever since — archive, or weapon.
the drama timeline
ACT I — THE DRAMA WIKI IS BORN (2004–2008)
A wiki for tracking LiveJournal feuds becomes the place the whole scene writes itself down.
-
DEC 2004
Girlvinyl founds ED
Sherrod DeGrippo — handle "Girlvinyl" — launches Encyclopedia Dramatica in December 2004, growing it out of LJdrama, the community that tracked gossip and blowups on LiveJournal. The premise: an encyclopedia of internet drama, written in a deliberately satirical, deliberately offensive register.
-
2006–08
The troll canon
As 4chan's /b/ and the early Anonymous raids take off, ED becomes their scrapbook — documenting the coordinated pranks and "raids" (the Habbo Hotel raids among them), archiving the memes, and codifying the vocabulary the scene ran on, above all "lulz." If a raid or a meme happened, ED is where it got an entry.
-
AUG 2008
The Times comes to look
Mattathias Schwartz's New York Times Magazine piece "Malwebolence" profiles the trolling underground and calls ED a "troll archive" — an online compendium of troll humor and troll lore — and gives lulz its most-quoted definition: "the joy of disrupting another's emotional equilibrium." Mainstream press now treats ED as the culture's reference desk.
ACT II — SHOCK FOR SHOCK'S SAKE (2008–2011)
Peak influence, peak offense — and the first legal notices arrive.
-
2008–10
The Devil's Dictionary, weaponized
ED positions itself as satire "in the spirit of Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary" — but its house style is shock for shock's sake, and its entries include harassment of named individuals and material its critics call defamatory and cruel. The archive of the scene is also, by the same token, the scene's harassment machine.
-
2010
Governments start writing letters
The Australian Human Rights Commission threatens legal action over a racist ED article — one of the first formal, state-level moves against the site, and a preview of the takedown-and-litigation era to come.
ACT III — THE SANITIZED REBOOT REVOLT (April 2011)
The founder decides the joke is old, pulls the plug, and the fanbase declares war.
-
APR 14, 2011
Redirect to "Oh Internet"
Without warning contributors, Girlvinyl redirects ED to "Oh Internet," a cleaned-up, advertiser-friendly meme site. Her explanation: a move to "a more toned down content style and a streamlined design," because "shock for shock's sake is old at this point." Oh Internet launches with roughly 207 meme articles against Know Your Meme's thousands — a museum with the exhibits removed.
-
APR 2011
The fanbase burns it down
The reaction is instant and vicious: ED regulars flood Oh Internet's Facebook wall with abuse, Reddit calls the sanitized version "completely pointless" and accuses the founders of selling out. The community that ED had documented turns on the site's own creator — the archive refuses to be archived.
ACT IV — OPERATION RESTORATION (2011–)
The users rebuild the original from cache and start a decade of running from host to host.
-
2011
Forked back from the dead
In what the community dubs "Operation Restoration," users rebuild the old wiki from Google's cache and stand it back up outside Girlvinyl's control. Ryan Cleary hosts an early fork at encyclopediadramatica.ch — before his own June 2011 arrest in the LulzSec investigation (see LulzSec). Oh Internet, meanwhile, quietly dies around 2013.
-
2012–
The domain nomad
Ownership passes down the line — Garrett Moore moves it to a .se domain in 2012; later operator Brian Zaiger takes over — and the site becomes a country-code refugee, hopping across .rs, .ch, .es, .se, .wiki, .online as hosts drop it. Zaiger frames the mission as pure archival: preserving "the side of social media that news sites don't."
-
2016–17
Court, and the bill
The legal era arrives in full: a UK court awards £10,000 in libel damages over an ED entry (2016), and gaming entrepreneur Jonathan Monsarrat sues ED for copyright infringement seeking $750,000 — a suit dismissed in December 2017. Vice finds the site broke and its legal-defense fund barely funded. The archive survives, but the running costs and the lawsuits never stop.
both sides, on the record
It was a harassment engine, not just an archive: ED's shock-for-shock house style included cruel, often defamatory entries about named individuals, and a UK court found at least one entry libelous enough to cost £10,000. Calling it a "museum" does not un-write the pages built to humiliate real people [1].
The founder herself walked away from it: the person who built ED came to hate what it became and tried to replace it with something without the slurs — "shock for shock's sake is old at this point." When the creator disowns the content, "it's just satire" gets harder to say with a straight face [3].
It genuinely is the archive of an era: ED wrote down the raids, the memes, and the lexicon that no mainstream outlet was recording, and even The New York Times treated it as the troll culture's reference work. Take it offline and a real chunk of internet history goes with it [5].
The satire register is stated and defended: ED has always positioned itself as parody "in the spirit of The Devil's Dictionary," and its operators frame the project as preservation of interactions the news ignores. Offensive by design is not the same as false [4].
The community, not a company, kept it alive: when its own founder tried to kill it, users rebuilt it from cache and have carried the hosting and legal costs across a dozen domains for over a decade. Whatever it is, people believe it should exist [4].
YOU DECIDE
ED really did become the institutional memory of trolling — the place the lulz got a definition and the raids got a citation — and it really did hurt named people to get there, badly enough that a court and a national human-rights body said so. Both are load-bearing; drop either and you get either the fan's shrine or the plaintiff's brief. Strip the myth away and you have a LiveJournal-gossip wiki that talked its way into being the archive of a subculture, got disowned by its own creator, and was dragged back to life by the exact crowd it had spent years cataloging.
The archive does not deify. The archive keeps the citation — and the libel judgment.
evidence locker
PRIMARY / REFERENCE
Wikipedia — Encyclopedia Dramatica ATTRIBUTED — dated record: the December 2004 founding out of LJdrama, the troll-archive role (raids, memes, lulz), the April 14, 2011 redirect to Oh Internet and the backlash, the fork / Operation Restoration, the domain-nomad hosting history, and the litigation (Australian HRC 2010, the UK libel award, the Monsarrat suit and its 2017 dismissal).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Dramatica Tubefilter — "Encyclopedia Dramatica Closes, Sanitized OhInternet Launches" (Apr 18, 2011) ATTRIBUTED — the shutdown, DeGrippo's "shock for shock's sake is old" rationale, Oh Internet's ~207 meme count, and the immediate user revolt.
tubefilter.com/2011/04/18/encyclopedia-dramatica
CONTEXT & CROSS-LINKS
Vice — "The Trouble With Keeping 'Wikipedia's Evil Twin' Online" ATTRIBUTED — the post-2011 revival under Brian Zaiger, the hosting and financial struggles, the Monsarrat copyright suit, and the operators' first-party archival mission ("we archive the side of social media that news sites don't").
vice.com/en/article/the-trouble-with-keeping-wikipedias-evil-twin-online The New York Times Magazine — "Malwebolence" (Mattathias Schwartz, Aug 3, 2008) ATTRIBUTED — the era-defining profile of the trolling underground that names ED a "troll archive" and gives lulz its canonical definition. (NYT bot-walls automated fetches with a 403; the page is live in a browser.)
nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html
The standard. Encyclopedia Dramatica is a public property of twenty years' standing; its founding, founder, reboot, fork, hosting history, and litigation are matters of record, documented on the pages above. Its existence and history are stated as fact; the character of its content is attributed to the named sources. The founder is named per public record — her own Wikipedia entry and contemporaneous press. ED's shock content, slurs, and the private individuals it targeted are characterized here, never reproduced and never re-named — the case against the site is made at full strength without repeating the harm. If a line here couldn't survive scrutiny, it wouldn't be on the page.