Not assessed is not a verdict

The gray-brown flamingo is the most misread mark on the site, and the product spends real effort making sure it is not.

What it says

We have not assessed this person, or we do not have enough to. Nothing more. It is not a low score. It is not a pending judgment. It is not a soft negative. It is the state of our record, not a statement about them.

Percent known

Alongside the state runs a percent known figure: how much of what we would want we actually have.

This is the honest counterweight to a confident-looking assessment. A high result computed from one appearance is a weak sample dressed as a finding, and the percent-known number is what stops the page from presenting the two identically.

It is also actionable. A low percent-known tells a citizen exactly what would improve the record — usually a channel or a long interview nobody has added yet.

The posture that binds every rendering

These are named living people who have not consented to being written about, so a standing discipline governs every surface:

• State what somebody did or said, not what they are. Acts and quotes, not character.
• Every claim carries a source, and material about a living person with no source does not get published at all.
• An unreviewed submission is never rendered publicly.
• An absence is never rendered as a finding. This whole page is that rule applied to one mark.
• The correction channel is real, it is open to the subject and to their staff, and a correction from the subject is welcomed rather than discounted.

Why the movement holds itself to this

The pattern this movement exists to break is the one where a gap in the record is treated as proof. Publishing our own gaps as verdicts would be the same move, pointed the other way — and it would be fair for anybody to say so.