- AI
- Catalog
Since September the catalog has carried French, German and Spanish twins of every peoples page with the facts, titles and questions translated. The two prose sections, About and Typical Phenotypes, were translated for only a few dozen peoples.
Today those two sections are live in all three languages for more than 800 peoples, which together are most of what readers open. A localized page now carries its own prose rather than a template around English facts.
Every translated text passed a second reading before it was accepted: a separate model judged fidelity, grammar and terminology against the English, and any text it found wanting was held for a person instead of published. About one text in thirty was held.
Under the hood
- Translation runs in two calls per people, one per section, so a refusal on one section never loses the other. The three languages come back in one reply and are checked for the same tags and placeholders as the English and for typographic dashes, which the site does not use.
- The judge reads each language separately and scores it from one to five; a two or below in a language holds that language's text alone. Held texts are listed with the judge's reason for an editor.
- A peoples page becomes complete in a language when both sections are present; the localized page then carries the prose, the facts, the FAQ and the related groups in that language. Complete pages went from a few per language to more than 800 per language.
- The texts load as seeds at startup and never overwrite a text a person has edited in the translation admin.
- peoples with both sections in each of fr, de and es
- 800+
- languages
- 3
- texts held for a person
- 1 in 30
See it on the site
Related build notes
- Sep 29, 2026The catalog in French, German and Spanish: 14,000 pages under their own addressesEvery section of the site, the peoples pages included, now has French, German and Spanish twins with translated addresses, and each page lists its alternates in the other languages.
- Sep 6, 2026The authoring engine: 10,837 entities, one rubric, 253 new pagesA Wikidata harvest, a written rubric and a four-step pipeline published 253 new peoples pages in one day, from the Mosuo to the Hidatsa to the Tzotzil.
- Aug 28, 2026Trait pages measure hair, eyes, skin and face from real portraits"Egyptian eyes" draws about 9,900 US searches a month. Trait pages answer questions like it with distributions measured from real portraits.