Biographicon

» see biographicon.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Biographicon was open for 173 days. It launched on 1 March 2008 out of Y Combinator, built by Ethan Herdrick as chief executive with Daniel Terhorst as chief technology officer, and the pitch fit in one sentence: a wiki with a page for every person, living or dead, and nothing standing between you and creating one. The tagline was all the people of the world.

What separated it from Wikipedia was the deletion policy, because it did not have a deletion policy. On Wikipedia a biography of somebody nobody else has written about gets nominated and removed, and in 2008 that process was producing more argument than almost anything else on the site. Rhodri Marsden in The Independent described the appeal exactly: you could put up details about yourself without fear of being nominated for deletion. The Wired Campus shortened the whole thing to Wikipedia for non-notables.

It also tried to hold a shape an encyclopedia never holds. Pages carried the connections between the people they covered, including the circumstances under which two people had met, which is the sort of fact that lives in obituaries and nowhere else. Ars Technica read the ambition off the front page and called it a potential who's who of world history. Herdrick wrote publicly about running the company on Scheme, which in 2008 was unusual enough that it got its own thread.

None of this reached me. A five-month American startup with a few thousand pages had no route to Ankara and no reason to travel, and I have no memory of the name from the year it existed. The argument underneath it did travel, though, because who gets to have a page turned out to be the question every platform since has had to answer, usually badly and usually in public.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the tagline ~

All the people of the world is a beautiful thing to write on a homepage and a terrible thing to promise. There were roughly six and a half billion people alive in 2008 and some hundred billion who had already died, and Biographicon was two men and a server. The gap between the stated scope and the actual staffing was not a marketing exaggeration, it was the entire product plan: the crowd would fill it, the way the crowd had filled Wikipedia.

Wikipedia had a seven-year head start and a mission people already believed in. Biographicon was asking for the same volunteer labor to produce something with no obvious reader, since the person most likely to write a page about a non-notable person is that person, and the person least likely to read it is everybody else.

~ what a notability rule is for ~

The founding insight was that Wikipedia's notability threshold is a wall and walls can be removed. That reads well until you ask what the wall was doing. Notability is not there to insult anyone. It is a proxy for verifiability, because a person who has been written about somewhere can be checked and a person who has not cannot, and it is also a workload cap, because every page that exists has to be watched by somebody for the rest of its life.

Remove the rule and you inherit both problems at once. Every page is unverifiable by construction and every page needs a maintainer who does not exist. Biographicon closed before this became visible at scale, which in a way spared it. The sites that removed the same wall and did get traction found out what an unmoderated biography of a private individual becomes.

~ the traction problem ~

Michael Arrington reviewed it on launch day and put the objection in plain terms: until it gets traction people will not for the most part bother entering their information. That is the cold-start problem stated without decoration, and for a directory of humans it is worse than usual, because the value of your page is entirely a function of how many other pages sit next to it.

On 21 August 2008 the founders closed it, citing insufficient user interest. There was a brief effort to restore the site afterward and it did not hold. Nothing dramatic happened here, no lawsuit and no buyer, just two people looking at the numbers in month six and deciding the numbers were not going to move.

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