Award, not a score

The decision

Everything published about a politician is an AWARD, or the absence of one — usually a percentage of that award earned. Never a score, a rating, a grade, points, or a verdict on the person.

In the terms of service and on every page, in the same words: they were either given an award, or a percentage of one, or they were not.

Why the word matters this much

Because of what each word claims.

A score is a measurement of a person. It implies a scale on which humans are ranked, and it invites the reading that the movement has assessed somebody's worth.

An award is something given, for specified acts, by stated criteria, that the recipient can dispute by disputing the acts. It makes the claim narrow and checkable, which is both more honest and more defensible.

This is the one copy decision in the product with a legal edge on it, and it was made deliberately rather than drifted into.

What it changed, and what it did not

Changed: every rendered string. The gloss is "Monkey Award (democracy damage)"; the old "Democracy Damage Score" appears nowhere. Page titles read Awards for: name. An uncomputed record reads No award yet.

Not changed: a single digit of arithmetic. Not one weight, floor, or rounding rule moved. Anybody reading the rename as a maths change is reading it wrong — and the movement's own regression tests would have caught it, because not one asserted value moved.

Also not changed: machine identifiers, stored field names, and already-published URLs. A route stays routable forever; breaking a shared link to somebody's award is worse than an old word in a path.

How it renders

The percentage big, the award word small — a large 72% over a small Llama Award. The number is the finding; the animal is the category.

What is deliberately not renamed

Citizen scoring. Karma, the citizen trust score, the leaderboard and the monthly statement all keep the word "score".

Those are about citizens — something a person earns by their own logged, corroborated work, in a system they volunteered for. That is not the same act as the movement giving a public figure a number on the strength of a record they never volunteered for, and the vocabulary keeps the two apart.