Today we conventionally consult encyclopaedias for biographical information. Probably at least as many readers seek this in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as in the Dictionary of National Biography, or Who's Who, or other specialist biographical dictionaries. But in the famous encyclopaedias of the Enlightenment such biographical information was absent. Neither Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia of 1728 nor the more renowned Encyclopedie (1751–80) edited by Denis Diderot and Jean D'Alembert, contained any biographical entries: when personal names appear these usually represent some larger intellectual doctrine, such as Baconianism, Cartesianism, or Newtonianism. From the early nineteenth century encyclopaedias began to include the biographical entries we now expect. However in its 1985 revision, the Britannica decided to relegate all biographical articles from its Macropaedia to the Micropaedia, except for those on ‘100 people who profoundly affected world history’. This was a departure from its previous twentieth-century editions, but still a long way from the rigorous exclusion practised by its eighteenth-century predecessors.