Digital Universe

» see digitaluniverse.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Joe Firmage co-founded USWeb in 1995 and took it public in 1998 at something like two and a half billion dollars, which in that particular year made him one of the people Forbes wrote flattering profiles about. Then in late 1998 he said publicly that he had encountered an extraterrestrial and started arguing that alien technology had implications for human physics. The board of a consulting firm in the middle of a merger did not want a CEO with that in his interviews. He stepped down and went off to spend the money on the ideas.

One of those ideas was Digital Universe. He announced it in December 2005 with Bernard Haisch, an astrophysicist who had spent his career on zero-point field theory and who had been running the Digital Universe Foundation since 2004. Their pitch was a single phrase and it was a good one: the PBS of the Web. Reference material for the public, checked by people who actually knew the subject, free at the point of reading and not paid for by advertising.

It opened for public trial in January 2006. The design was two wikis stacked on top of each other. Underneath sat a public wiki that anybody with a verified real name could edit, and above it a stewarded layer where researchers and scholars reviewed what came up and decided what became the approved version. Haisch talked about Carl Sagan's Encyclopedia Galactica when explaining what he thought they were building, which tells you the register the whole project was pitched in.

~ the case file ~

~ the man who paid for it ~

The corporate structure was three entities doing three jobs. ManyOne Networks was the for-profit company writing the software, a browser and portal system meant to render the whole thing. The ManyOne Foundation sat in Canada. The Digital Universe Foundation held the content. By January 2006 investors and foundations had put in about ten and a half million dollars.

Firmage kept funding science media and propulsion research through the same period, some of it with Ann Druyan, who had been Sagan's collaborator and widow. That is the honest context for Digital Universe: it was the reference-work arm of a private project to reorganize how the public learns science, run by a man whose credibility in Silicon Valley had been spent in a single interview and who was working with what was left.

~ the slide ~

Larry Sanger joined as a director and helped launch the first real portal, the Encyclopedia of Earth. He was the obvious hire and also the warning sign, because Sanger had already co-founded Nupedia, watched its seven-step expert review process produce two dozen articles in a year, and watched the wiki they bolted onto the side of it eat the entire project and become Wikipedia. He had learned that lesson from the inside and had drawn from it that the wiki needed experts, not that the experts needed a wiki.

He left in late 2006, calling it a leave of absence, and announced Citizendium the same autumn. Citizendium was the same wager placed independently: real names, expert approval, gentle editorial authority. Within five years both projects had the same problem. Credentialed specialists write for citations and for students, and a general-audience encyclopedia pays in neither. Volunteers who want no credential and no permission will write for nothing, forever, and there are a hundred times more of them.

~ what survived ~

The Encyclopedia of Earth was the part that worked. It launched with more than four hundred expert-written articles on the environment and the human relationship to it, ran on MediaWiki under a Creative Commons license, and kept a real scholarly board for years after the parent project had gone quiet. By 2011 Sanger was describing it as the main thing left standing from his time there.

Digital Universe itself never announced anything. The site was still working in January 2019 and had stopped by the end of that year, with no farewell page and no press notice, and the domain now serves a generic lander that has nothing to do with any of this. Thirteen years, ten and a half million dollars, and the exit was a DNS record quietly changing hands.

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