Encyclopedia Dramatica

Encyclopædia Dramatica (often abbreviated to just "ED") was a satirical open wiki that used MediaWiki software. Launched on December 10, 2004, it lampooned both encyclopedic topics and current events, especially those related to or relevant to Internet culture. It was frequently utilized by a socially fluid and dynamic Internet subculture known as Anonymous. The site celebrated a subversive "trolling culture", having documented significant incidents of underground internet events such as mass organized pranks (trolling events they termed as "raids"), large scale failures of the Internet infrastructure and security, and criticism of some more conservative Internet communities they accused of self-censoring their own content in order to garner prestige, positive coverage and commentary from traditional and established media outlets. Wired described Encyclopædia Dramatica as a "vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated, and you will discover an elaborate trolling culture: Flamingly racist and misogynist content lurks throughout, all of it calculated to offend". Ninemsn described Encyclopædia 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."
The original site shut down without warning on April 16, 2011, and relaunched itself as Oh Internet, leading to criticism from parts of the ED community.
Whilst Oh Internet mysteriously disappeared in 2013, ED relaunched officially on * encyclopediadramatica.se under new management.
It has switched TLDs often, starting with the Swiss .ch, then to the Swedish .se, then to Spain's .es, then back to the Sweden's .se, then to Serbia's .rs, then to .wiki, then to .online, then to .top, then .win and then to the present address of edramatica.com.
As of October/November 2018, Donny Long and PornWikiLeaks are attempting to have ED shut down. To accomplish this, they are engaging in harassment and intimidation, issuing ultimatums with 24-hour deadlines to ED's hosts, and promising to write wiki attack articles on them and their families. At least two of ED's hosts gave in to Long's demands, with at least one of them expecting Long to reciprocate the gesture by deleting content targeting them. Constantly switching host has proved troublesome (and likely costly) and ED's SysOp SeeBeen deleted ED's "Donny Long" article. After the article was deleted, Long increased his demands to having all mentions of him removed from ED, including its discussion and comments sections; thus, Long's campaign against ED continues.
They state to have a strong policy of archival, and the current administration have promised to "provide occasional downloadable content in case anything happens" (https://edramatica.com/Encyclopedia_Dramatica:ARCHIVE_FUCKING_EVERYTHING). They also seem very inclined to keeping it up and online. The page also mentions that a full EDF6 archive is planned; however, the "Encyclopedia Dramatica Archive Librarian" website it links to leads to a nonexistent page on the wiki, and internet searching hasn't turned up anything about the group nor effort itself.
== Current Backups ==
Try to make an XML article text backup every few months. It's pretty easy, the article text adds up to just a few hundred megabytes. Just use the Wikiteam scripts.
Warning: For now, only make XML (full page text) backups. These are just a few hundred megabytes. ED's current[when?] image collection is over 2 Terabytes in size and growing, so image backups have to be done by the admins. Hopefully we can connect the ED admins to the Internet Archive, since they can easily take in archives of that size in special cases.
* 2013-02-29 XML - 
* 2013-02-08 XML - 
* 2015-06-28 XML - (snapshot, no edit history) + images (27 GB)
* 2018-11-04 XML - 
The Encyclopedia Dramatica used to make themselves, but they must have forgotten about doing it over the years.
* Feb 28 2013 - - https://static.encyclopediadramatica.se/archives/text-2-28-2013.xml.gz
* Jan 31 2013 - https://static.encyclopediadramatica.se/archives/text-1-31-2013.xml.gz
* Dec 31 2012 - https://static.encyclopediadramatica.se/archives/text-12-31-2012.xml.gz
* Oct 31 2012 - https://static.encyclopediadramatica.se/archives/text-10-31-2012.xml.gz
* Sept 25 2012 - https://static.encyclopediadramatica.se/archives/text-09-25-2012.xml.gz
They have a link to a text dump made on Feb 01 2023 (https://archive.org/download/wiki-feb-2023/wiki-feb-2023.xml), on their ARCHIVE FUCKING EVERYTHING page. However, it doesn't seem to work.
== 2011's Operation SaveED ==
The original site shut down without warning on April 16, 2011, and relaunched itself as Oh Internet, leading to criticism from parts of the ED community.
Whilst Oh Internet mysteriously disappeared in 2013, a group of anons, including Edgeworth E. Euler and Zaiger, relaunched ED at under new management. They used these backups to (which was recovered by a research group studying Operation Payback) and some portions of the image collection, though not everything.
It has switched TLDs often, starting with the Swiss .ch, then to the Swedish .se, then to Spain's .es, then back to the Sweden's .se, then to Serbia's .rs, then .wiki.
* encyclopediadramatica.rs - Winrar.
* lurkmoarpedia.com
* encyclopediaerratica.com
=== Sources ===
* Google Cache Rips
* Internet Archive Rips
* Webecology Project Dumps (Local Mirror (gone now; link is to Wayback Machine))
* Torrents (see also Reddit/4chan)
=== 2011-06-22 backup ===
As of 2018-11-03, these links are dead.
An unofficial backup of the pages on encyclopediadramatica.se can be downloaded from http://www.multiupload.com/T7IO7EK1BW :
The file is a tar archive compressed with `xz(1)` from 674MB to 39MB. It contains the complete revisions of each page in MediaWiki XML format, so should be importable into a new MediaWiki installation. It contains metadata for all of the images, also in XML format. The images themselves are packaged separately--see below.
Every full-size (i.e. excluding thumbnails) image has been saved under its SHA1 hex digest. There are over 10GB of image files in total so they have been split over 16 archives, organised by the first character of their filename. Each archive also contains metadata for all of the images which allows mapping the SHA1 digest to their original filename. As above, the archives are in .tar.xz format.
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-0.tar.xz (566MB). SHA1: 7f694d76d5b45d71f9e8f8bd237ced3fbb4bbd2b
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-1.tar.xz (591MB). SHA1: a97551d09931fabb912c9764d0383515248c7af4
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-2.tar.xz (580MB). SHA1: a1f8549cd4026c1f46e311c52b8b4efee8de9f6b
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-3.tar.xz (552MB). SHA1: a07ba98222c9918c721d6fb7e3192501e351401b
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-4.tar.xz (571MB) SHA1: 0508dc3da62400b7979e4e4ef5655517d54b0004
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-5.tar.xz (570MB) SHA1: 52531b457f9284887c7bba6badef029f1b527ef5
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-6.tar.xz (583MB) SHA1: d29f089b30bf6684fd9cb2c4cfabcc357e4df0f4
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-7.tar.xz (570MB) SHA1: c6f88f8c743bfad1b9dc5d412afe646b3aed8f07
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-8.tar.xz (562 MB) SHA1: 0b941cfe31a81713dd35c2f40d1b560fe4032261
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-9.tar.xz (572MB) SHA1: b3765c6b03cd784b4030a8499ddbb8d2ae0ef61a
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-a.tar.xz (577MB) SHA1: 0816ec0b158dcd2a788a2384d3e2090cb26e07fa
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-b.tar.xz (588 MB) SHA1: c9d4f3a21b68052ba41ff9452451d3501e86c1e4
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-c.tar.xz (558 MB) SHA1: 3eaf18d3bd94f35e3cbb58adcb3511bfa476a56f
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-d.tar.xz (558 MB) SHA1: 9d2b688d503c32bc7b644dbc690a418f31e764b3
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-e.tar.xz (538M) SHA1:1def8a06255c27e0e03a36bbc1a7d84fd57185d6]
* encyclopediadramatica.ch-images-2011-06-22-f.tar.xz (593M) SHA1: 60f114a019971fe19a885aa07971bb4f069e2e49
=== 2010-01-13 backup ===
The Internet Archive also got a full backup at the start of 2010. It's a bit old (or at the height of ED's heyday, depending how you look at it) but it's complete, including images. Not certain about page history, though. 12GB total: 
== Announcements ==
=== Anonnews.org ===
* Anonnews.org (archive.org mirror) - OpSaveED - You can't throw Encyclopedia Dramatica away!
* Anonnews.org (archive.org mirror) - A formal status update on the Encyclopedia Dramatica revival movement
=== Ohinternet.com ===
* TODO
== External links ==
* geekosystem.com - Interview with Sherrod de Grippo
* gawker.com - Interview with Sherrod de Grippo
== IRC ==
* irc://irc.anonops.net:6667/OpSaveED OpSaveED - IRC-Channel
* irc://irc.anonops.net:6667/ED encyclopediadramatica.ch - IRC-Channel
* irc://irc.anonops.net:6667/OpSaveED - Lurkmoarpedia IRC-Channel as mentioned on their Main_Page?
== References ==
Category:Wikis
Category:Encyclopedia Dramatica