Forums / Discussion / Meme Research

ED (Encyclopedia Dramatica) has been "encouraged" to be used in research on KYM for quite awhile. Why? Who knows. Encyclopedia Dramatica is not supposed to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, they say readers probably won't learn much on the wiki itself. ED is supposed to be for humour and entertainment, not a trusted research source.

Anyways, this is probably in the wrong sub-forum, but due to the rules and pinned-posts being extremely disorganized, plus the over-use of links to other parts of the forums in Mod-Posts, I am deciding to risk posting here.

I am sorry for not including more points. However, if you have a point to prove me wrong or support my argument, feel free to reply.

How did I type two "Sources?" Must be tiresome.

While it's not meant to be taken seriously, they do still list sources for their articles. When researching stuff like internet memes, we really can't limit ourselves to "scholarly articles" when looking up stuff like "expand dong" or "drakeposting"

Despite their rather unorthodox method for documenting anything, they still do provide sources themselves, either through images or videos. They also go into detail about things surrounding the stuff they document.

I'd say it works just as well as most of the things we use.

It's all a matter of separating fact and opinion, I think. There's a lot of opinion that we certainly can't use, but there's also a lot of fact in what they say as well. Plus as others have mentioned, they give citations a lot of the time. You just have to use good judgement about it when you use their pages for research so you don't actually put, for example, "this happened Last Thursday" in a Know Your Meme entry.

I suppose we can use ED as a starting point, but follow their citations and use those as sources instead of ED itself.

Good points.

It's a pretty bad idea for any commercial website to encourage the use and sourcing of an encyclopedia that praises Hitler and hosts pictures of severed dicks.

Yeah, but the problem is that the majority of memes come from places where that kind of shit is… well, a thing.

I am going to make a bold assumption and say that most memes do not originate from ED. There is a difference between going to a shitty website in order to get the source and going to a shitty website that already got the source for me from another shitty website.

ED is not useful or necessary anymore, but is still a default source field. That should probably be changed.

If we were talking about sources for WWII history or something, I would agree. But this is about documenting the internet, and the internet is not a nice place. Now, if there are more "primary" sources that give the same necessary information, then it's not useful. But I get the strong feeling that's not always going to be the case, considering how the original location of things can "disappear".
Now if someone wants to add a little NSFW warning to every external link to ED, I'd say that's fair.

The majority of memes do not come from "not nice" places anymore.

4chan is archived. Screenshots exist. If an ED article happened to have information that could not be found anywhere else, that would mean they do not have a source to begin with. You would have to follow their word by blind faith, which would be counterproductive and make the whole process pointless.

Why is a middle man necessary?

Because sometimes when there's a gap in absolutely concrete knowledge, it makes sense to fill it in with stuff that's on shakier ground.
Besides, ED isn't always the "middle man". In terms of the "online subculture", it's a pretty big deal and has been for years. They love to call KYM a rip-off of them over there, and that's not exactly a completely invalid point.

4chan is archived. Screenshots exist.

4chan archives can't be trusted as permanent sources because a site for them goes down every other month. They also often only go back so far, leaving you with no source.

Searching them is even a bigger pain. And you can't search for screencaps.

The majority of memes do not come from “not nice” places anymore.

So ED as a source is then bad because…?

It fits the standard apparently.

If an ED article happened to have information that could not be found anywhere else, that would mean they do not have a source to begin with.

Because the NY Times is just dying to document baby rape or the average shitty furry that has an article there. There are topics other sites intentionally steer away from.

You would have to follow their word by blind faith, which would be counterproductive and make the whole process pointless.

There is a point where you're going to have to, nothing is perfect. You then write "According to X and Y…" at which point it's clear our direct knowledge is limited.

Plenty on the internet is saved, but plenty is lost forever. You won't always find back a direct source, at which point you're going to have to trust someone else's research.

You should become a professional critic, just calling everything that is researched bullshit until they show you datasheets.

Why is a middle man necessary?

This point can be applied to every source section on entries. Why is Wikipedia or are Wikias necessary?

Keep ED.

ED is not a source for memes, but it documents a lot of internet phenomena related to 4chan and other forums. 4chan is a huge contributor to many memes.

Also, a lot of the shit that ED says is… er… joked around with a lot. They don't really push any real opinion other than everyone is fucking scum (seriously, read their pages on conservatives if you don't believe me)

I don't see Chris-Chan and Tom Preston mention on the ED KYM page.

I don't see Encyclopedia Dramatica as an official source of information, but as that one really seedy guy the undercover cop will pay $200 in order to get some dirt on a major crime lord.

Keep in mind that some pages on ED have NC content, wich this site forbids to give links to.
So stay alert for WHAT you give links and at least give a warning if the link contains NSFW stuff.(except when the entry/thread is already labeled NSFW, that is…)