- Community
- Design
On August 5 we shipped the Verdict Strip: one question under the portrait on every group page, answered with a single tap and no account. The tally appears the moment you answer. Since August 13, a portrait with no verdicts opens the strip with the line "Nobody has judged this one yet."
The ask spread across the site in under three weeks. Pose pages gained a matching strip for their drawn figures on August 7, country pages on August 17, and region and language-family cluster pages on August 24. The question reads "Does this portrait look right for" the people named, a form that works for every name in the catalog, singular, plural or qualified.
Since August 24 a verdict leads somewhere. After each tap the strip hands the reader a portrait of another people that nobody has judged, so one answer becomes a chain. Every "looks off" verdict feeds the queue of portraits up for a redesign.
Under the hood
- Each reader holds one verdict per portrait. A second tap on the same face flips that verdict instead of stacking a new one.
- The next-face hand-off samples the catalog in small bounded windows for a group whose lead portrait carries no verdicts, instead of scanning the whole catalog, because the lookup fires on every tap.
- Pose tallies are tied to the version of the drawing the reader saw. When a figure is redrawn its public tally starts fresh, and the earlier rows stay for a before and after read. Feedback is a count, never an edit: no path runs from a crowd tally into the published pose dataset.
- On country pages the faces slider renders the exact portrait being judged, and auto-advance stays off wherever the ask appears, so a verdict always lands on the face the reader was looking at.
- The question avoids inventing a demonym for each of the catalog's peoples. "Look right for X" reads correctly for plural names, singular names and names with a parenthetical, and the "Looks right" button answers it directly.
- page types carry the ask
- 5
- accounts needed to vote
- 0
Peoples in this entry
See it on the site
Sources and open data
Related build notes
- May 14, 2026Every group gets a gallery, and the community picks the coverPortraits became galleries. Members vote on every image and flag the ones that miss, and the top-rated portrait becomes each group's cover.
- 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.
- Sep 7, 2026Say what looks off in one tap, then judge five portraits in placeReason chips turn a 'Looks off' tap into a labeled reason, and an inline deck lets readers rate up to five portraits without leaving the page.