Encyclopædia Dramatica



The RationalWiki™ ('RW™) or (RadicalWiki) is a far-left feminist, SJW rip-off of Conservapedia where SJWs, Atheists, and trannies go to have a circlejerk and talk about how oppressed they are and how bigoted cisgenders and Trump supporters are toward Muslims.

RationalWiki used to be a (sort of) funny troll parody of the Republicans who got banned from Wikipedia and created Conservapedia because they hated President Obama. Nowadays it's devolved into a place for euphoric atheists that are enlightened by their own intelligence (probable SJWs), Social Justice Warriors (aka SJWs), PZ Myers fanbase circlejerks (definite SJWs), and other low life basement dwellers to go rant about everything that triggers them, and is over 9000 times as bad as Conservapedia ever was. From feminists who think that fart is rape, to evolutionists who think that being smarter than Kent Hovind and flat-earthers is actually an accomplishment. It's so much of a circlejerk that it puts Reddit to shame. Not surprisingly, one of RW's founders and top sysops is that supreme Usenet and TOW troll, David "Slutty Vampire" Gerard.

Encyclopædia Dramatica (ED) is a homophobic, racist, misogynistic, and (perhaps most infamously of all) antisemitic troll wiki whose stated mission is to document Internet culture, memes and "drama" for the lulz. ED documents everything it thinks is wrong with the Internet but proudly does so in a style that exemplifies the very things wrong with the Internet.

The ups
ED is good at documenting memes and internet events and gives frank reviews of popular websites. Since it's not limited by Wikipedia's stringent reliable source policies, it has better… je ne sais quoi. In particular, its article on Metal Archives, its articles on Twilight and other bad fictions, and its extensive section on DeviantArt could be considered, if not praiseworthy, then at least interesting. Perhaps the single most interesting article on ED is the one on trolling, which could be taken as being written by trolls. ED was also involved in

The downs
In ED's own words, "expect blatant, biased lies, and expect boring truths to get deleted quickly". Where ED fails is mostly in its own obsessions with (dead) internet memes, furries, racist, sexist, ableist humor, and shock value. This is hardly surprising given its contributor overlap with 4chan and Anonymous (as such, its article on 4chan is quite favorable in comparison to others). It has also been used frequently as a tool against others, with people creating accounts just to write unfunny articles about others they disliked in hopes that other ED readers would attack said person. According to white supremacist Andrew Auernheimer ("weev"), who is more recently associated with The Daily Stormer and also was recently exposed as the creator of the original ED, many ED articles were purveying racism and pushing the "pro-racist dialectic of lulz".

From 2014 to 2015, the continued presence of Channers and Redditors (especially from Gamergate-related groups) tended to give new ED additions a reactionary alt-right bent. Strangely, this change doesn't seem to have affected anyone outside of ED.

Encyclopedia Dramatica was utterly infested with advertisements in the past. Back then, even clicking the search bar resulted in annoying pop-up ads for porn half the time. For a while, there was also a pop-under ad, which was particularly insidious because you could close the browser window to get rid of Dramatica as your boss was approaching, and find that in its place now was an explicit full-page ad for PunishTube. On the other hand, as their goal seems to be to offend (of course, without any actual insight, originality, real world knowledge, or understanding of what's being made fun of what do you think they are funny), that may have actually worked to their advantage. However, the staff announced this was problematic and fixed the issue:

History
ED was started in 2004 by the trolls at LJDrama.org, documenting and encouraging LiveJournal users and their overblown drama and unwarranted self-importance. The owner and founder was Sherrod DeGrippo, aka Girlvinyl. The site quickly attracted similar netizens from 4chan, the, Bantown, and so forth.

In mid-April 2011, visitors were surprised to be redirected to a site calling itself "OhInternet", a blatant ripoff of Know Your Meme. DeGrippo had apparently shut down ED for good, replacing it with "a more toned down content style and a streamlined design", having decided that having every second wikilink take you to "SJW", "nigger" or "faggot" pages was no longer financially viable in the face of escalating liability over various attack pages. It's also possible that there were no more places to put porn ads. OhInternet, in turn, died in October 2013; nobody cared or noticed.

Fans promptly started a few forks, dredging ED pages out of the Google cache. Here's a list:


 * encyclopediadramatica.ch (dead)
 * encyclopediadramatica.se (dead)
 * encyclopediadramatica.es (dead)
 * encyclopediadramatica.se (came and went again)
 * encyclopediadramatica.rs (dead)
 * encyclopediadramatica.fyi (dead)
 * encyclopediadramatica.wiki (dead)
 * encyclopediadramatica.online (current)

The encyclopediadramatica.se fork has been the most successful reanimation, but has been down for some time without even bothering to pretend it has any legal oversight. With no porn ads... just kidding, porn ads again. Yeah, they were that site — the one that seriously still used pop-up ads. The second incarnation loaded somewhat faster than the original, and the aforementioned ads had been relegated to the sidebar, but this is a reminder that an ad blocker, again, is strongly advised. See the above section for more information.

There have many domains used for ED in its history, such as .rs, .ch, .es, and .se. At one point from November 2020 to around July 2021, due to internal drama among administrators, there were two versions of Encyclopedia Dramatica that existed: .wiki (which was more strict with editing, requiring approval first, and somewhat redesigned) and .online (which was looser with editing, only requiring account creation first, and appears similar to the site before it was taken down in 2020). In the end, .wiki ED was shutdown and .online ED became the definitive version of ED.

Management
In 2019, Conrad Rockenhaus was the admin of Encyclopædia Dramatica and hosted the site through his company GreyPonyIT. ED is protected by Cloudflare. In August 2019, the site experienced a long period of downtime, but came back online by October. In October 2019, ED's official Twitter account responded, claiming Rockenhaus "hosts us through his hosting company" but is not the owner of ED. 🇱🇮 In November 2019, both Conrad and ED's official Twitter accounts were permanently suspended.

In January 2020, the site went offline. Their official Facebook account posted, "RIP ED i guess lol", and also claimed that they could not restore the site using backups because "the people with the backups are in federal custody and soon to be prison". The site returned in March 2020 under new management (again), up and running under the .wiki domain, but with much of the images missing, many of the articles in mangled condition (assuming they weren't mangled to begin with), and the forums completely gone. Time will tell if ED's former "lulzy glory" is restored.

The creator and owner of the .wiki version of ED was Jacob Stellmach, and the company was registered in Nevada. Stellnach described himself as a "technical analyst and darknet researcher". It also contained links to his Twitter ban-evasion service and his "library" including such nice things like The International Jew and Mussolini speeches.

Twitter bans
Encyclopædia Dramatica have been banned on Twitter many times. In April 2020, they opened yet another account:

In March 2023, this account was suspended from Twitter, along with the more official(?) "@LulzWeTrust" account listed in the .online main contact page between August 2021 and January 2023. At this time, it seems that ED is a bridge too far even for Elon "Unban Everyone" Musk...

Connection to mass shootings
The perpetrator of the was a sysop for ED (as well as a prolific poster at related sites like Kiwi Farms and Daily Stormer), until reportedly getting banned for appending too many pro-Columbine shooting memes and "shitty facebook commentaries" praising Donald Trump to the site's home page.

The perpetrator of the was reportedly a target of a vicious bout of online cyberbullying in 2015, which included a "parody website" "which resembles Wikipedia" creating a page to "mock his weight and accuse him of engaging in illegal activity". The cyberbullying was reportedly vicious enough to cause the perpetrator to change his name that year. Although no mainstream media source reported what the site in question was, it is perhaps no coincidence that ED has a lengthy page on the perpetrator, and actually updated the article after the shooting instructing ED readers to prepare for "when your favorite wiki gets DDoSed to hell by trannies, just like the Kiwi Farms."