Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED or æ; stylized as Encyclopædia Dramatica) is an online community website, centered around a wiki. The website's articles use an encyclopedic style to parody topics and events relevant to contemporary internet culture. Encyclopedia Dramatica also serves as a repository of information and a means of discussion for the hacker group known as Anonymous. An article in The New York Times said that the wiki was "effectively" acting as a "troll archive". It celebrates its subversive "NSFW" "troll site culture" and documents internet memes, events such as mass organized pranks, trolling events called "raids", large-scale failures of internet security, and criticism by its users of other internet communities they accuse of censoring themselves in order to garner positive coverage from traditional and established media outlets. The site hosts numerous pornographic and gore images, along with misogynistic, racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and homophobic content.

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. On the night of the Encyclopedia Dramatica shutdown, regular ED visitors bombarded the 'Oh Internet' Facebook wall with hate messages. The Web Ecology Project published a downloadable archive of Encyclopedia Dramatica's content the next day. Besides this archive, fan-made torrents and several mirrors of the original site were subsequently generated. Based on these archives, the site has repeatedly gone offline and come back under new domain names. Between 2013 and 2024, the website was hosted under various top level domains: .rs, .ch, .es, .se, .wiki, .online, .top, .win and .gay. As of October 2025^[update], the only active mirror of ED is edramatica.com.

Encyclopedia Dramatica was founded in 2004 by Sherrod DeGrippo, also known by the online pseudonym "Girlvinyl". 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.

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 (also known online by the pseudonym 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 de Raadt 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 /b/, a notorious Internet imageboard at 4chan. Encyclopedia 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 come 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 Encyclopedia 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 Encyclopedia Dramatica were particularly critical of MySpace 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". 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.