About
rankl is a website where anyone on the internet can vote on a single ranking of everything in the world. The catalog has 10,033 things, and the internet has cast 1,900 votes.
Sources. The catalog is Wikipedia's Vital Articles (levels 1-4): roughly 10,000 subjects that Wikipedia editors have argued into being the most important ones: people, foods, movies, animals, ideas, all of it. We re-sync with Wikipedia once a day. Promotions and demotions by their editors show up on the Changes page.
Methodology. You vote up or down on random things, or pick the winner of a random head-to-head duel (the winner gets an upvote, the loser a downvote). You can vote on one item only once per day to prevent spam voting. The day is UTC, so it resets at midnight UTC rather than 24 hours after your vote. Items you have already voted on today are left out of both queues. Items are ordered by their upvote rate, measured as a Bayesian average, with prior mean 0.5 and prior weight 20. Ties are broken by the most recent upvote, then by the oldest downvote.
Performance. Nothing here is a single-page app trick. The pages are ordinary server renders, read fresh from SQLite on every request. What makes the site feel instant is aggressive pre-fetching and caching. When you first load the site, the server picks the next few things you will vote on, and sends them along with the leaderboard. Your browser pre-fetches the images directly from Wikimedia so that when you request the next item, the image renders instantly. When you cast a vote, your computer locally updates the leaderboard and your vote history, so you see the change immediately without waiting for two round-trips for the database to mutate and fetch.
Privacy. There is no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party tracker on this site. Voting does have to tell people apart, so the first time you actually cast a vote we set one cookie, rankl_v, holding your random id and nothing else. Your browser separately remembers which things you have voted on and which cards are queued up next.
Data retention. A vote is stored as the thing, the direction, your random id, and a hash of your IP address -- the address itself is never written to the database, and the hash exists only to catch one person voting from several browsers. Those rows are deleted after 60 days, but the running totals stay. Thumbnails load straight from Wikimedia and the site sits behind Cloudflare, so both of them see your request the way any site's image host and CDN would.
Titles, descriptions, and images come from Wikipedia and are licensed CC BY-SA.
A site by Sean Yang and Eric Zhong.