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Readers cast 778 verdicts on the portraits of 333 peoples in the first month of the one-tap verdict strip, and every verdict is open data. On September 7 we gave the 'Looks off' answer a vocabulary. After that tap, chips ask what looks off: skin tone, face, hair, or clothing and setting, and a reader can pick several at once.
The same day we built an inline judging deck. After the first tap on a people's page, the strip deals up to four more unjudged portraits, one at a time, with the same two buttons and the same chips. The reader never leaves the page. Both reached readers on September 8.
Together they turn a thumbs-down into a direction. The tags say which feature readers question, the deck carries a reader from one judgment to the next, and both flow into the published verdict table.
Under the hood
- The chips are a closed vocabulary of four values: skin, face, hair and setting. Every tag is validated against that list, deduplicated and stored in a set order, because the column is published verbatim in the open dataset under CC BY 4.0.
- A chip tap annotates the reader's existing 'Looks off' verdict and never creates a new one. Switching the verdict to 'Looks right' clears the tags, so a tag cannot outlive the judgment it explains.
- The deck draws unjudged faces from the same homeland region as the page first, then from the whole catalog when the region runs short, so the deck still fills.
- Deck votes carry their own surface label, so deck judgments and on-page judgments stay separable in the published table.
- The strip takes no typed text: every signal is a tap mapped to a known value. Deck state follows each portrait's image ID, and 'Skip this one' advances without writing anything.
- reader verdicts in the first month
- 778
- peoples judged
- 333
- portraits per deck, at most
- 5
Peoples in this entry
See it on the site
Sources and open data
Related build notes
- Aug 5, 2026One tap under every portrait asks: does this look right?The Verdict Strip puts one question under each portrait, needs no account, and hands every reader the next face nobody has judged.
- Aug 17, 2026Reader verdicts become an open research datasetOne-tap verdicts now land in a public table: 173 judgments across 108 groups in v5, with the labels open under CC BY 4.0.
- Sep 25, 2026Voted off the page: readers now replace portraits that look offWhen a majority of readers say a portrait looks off, the site renders replacements, promotes one and says why on the page. Twenty faces changed in a day.