Nobody here is an authority

Every other etiquette guide is one writer with a deadline. This one has no verdict field. Ask the database what it thinks is rude in Lisbon and it cannot tell you, because the answer is not stored anywhere. It is computed, every time, from what people who live there have said.

A claim is not an answer

A claim is one behaviour, in one place, in one situation. "Tipping at a restaurant" in Japan, at dinner. That is all the document holds: the statement, the two references, and its stage. No stance, no score, no summary.

Voices, weighted

Anyone can answer rude, fine or depends. Not every answer counts the same. Someone who says they are from there counts 2×, someone who lived there 1.5×, a visitor 0.5×. Confidence nudges it a little either way. We take people at their word about where they are from, which is the weakest joint in the whole design, and the reason every claim shows its split rather than just its winner.

When it becomes settled

A claim needs 5 attestations, at least3 of them from locals, and 70% of the weighted voices pointing the same way. Then it reads as settled. If agreement falls below 55% it moves to the contested board instead, where it stays visible with the disagreement on display. There is no state in which this site prints a confident answer that the locals do not actually share.

Nothing is final

Manners drift. A settled claim that nobody has attested to in a year reopens by itself and has to earn its place again. Anyone can dispute one in writing, which flags it for a moderator, who can keep it, split it into narrower claims, or retire it. Retired claims stay in the database with their whole history; they just stop being shown.

How it is built

Content lives in Sanity. The stages are a workflow, the recomputation and the duplicate check are serverless functions, and moderators rule on disputes in a custom app that sits next to the editor. The site itself is Astro, served as static files with a few live parts.

The dataset is public: project dh2oc30x, datasetproduction. Every number on this site can be recomputed from it by anyone who wants to check our arithmetic.