How We Curate
What earns a grave
A subject is admitted only if it meets three conditions: it was once genuinely dominant in its domain; it is unambiguously dead — dissolved, extinct, or gone with no living institutional continuity; and its death is documented well enough to cite. Decline, obsolescence, or merger into a successor does not qualify unless the original entity itself ceased to exist. When the gate is uncertain, we leave the subject out.
Sourcing
Every claim on this site links to a named source. The 385 graves currently carry 1202 citations between them. Language models assist with drafting and organisation; they do not supply facts. Every date, figure, and cause of death is taken from a cited source or computed from raw inputs we store. If a claim has no verifiable source, it does not appear.
The Forgottenness Index
For graves that have a documented peak magnitude, we compute the gap between how great a thing was at its height and how little it is remembered today. Two percentile ranks are calculated within each wing — cross-wing comparison (an empire's territory against a language's speaker count) would be meaningless:
- Peak rank — its size at its height, as a percentile among others of its kind.
- Remembrance rank — a present-day memory proxy: a blend of English Wikipedia pageviews over the last twelve months and the number of language editions its Wikipedia article exists in.
Forgottenness = peak rank − remembrance rank. A thing that was enormous and is now barely read about scores high; a thing remembered in proportion to its former size scores near zero. The index is left blank where no defensible peak figure exists — most dead languages, for instance.
Remembrance inputs are fetched directly from the Wikimedia REST and MediaWiki APIs and stored with their retrieval date. The index recomputes on every build. Its principal bias is Anglophone: English Wikipedia under-represents subjects better remembered in other language communities. The language-edition count partially corrects for this.
What "death" means, by wing
For an empire, kingdom, or company: the dissolution of the entity itself. Absorption into a successor, rebranding, or spin-off does not count. For a language: the death of the last person who acquired it as a first language — which is not the same as zero speakers. Where revival or second-language communities exist, the grave says so. For a god or a cult: the end of documented, active worship with no unbroken line to a living community.
Suggest a grave
If you know of a subject that meets these standards and is not yet in the collection, we welcome the lead. Include a name, a death date, and at least one verifiable source.