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Engineering notesVolume 3 of 8 · The people
Volume 3

The People Who Dance

A dancer has several spellings, a few partners, a festival circuit, and sometimes a world title. None of it is written anywhere a computer can read. This is how TangoTube builds a list of 10,947 people from the titles strangers typed, without putting anyone’s name on a dance they were not in, and then hands each person the keys to their own page.

dancers
10,947dancers
“this person is in this video”
278,110“this person is in this video”
real partnerships
5,559real partnerships
world champions
91world champions
dancers on the map of the scene
90dancers on the map of the scene

Part 01

One person, many strings

Mariano FrúmboliChicho FrumboliMariano “Chicho” FrúmboliChichoone personcanonical name + aliases“Francisco Canaro”led the band,never dancedMusicians, venues and song titles all look like people. Lists of them stand at the door.
Four spellingsUploaders spell a name every way a keyboard allows, accents optional.
One pointEvery string is an alias pointing at a single person. Strings are never the person.
Not a dancerBandleaders, singers, venues, and song titles are turned away by curated lists.

A recording cannot be libelled; a person can. Putting someone’s name on a performance they were not in is a mistake with a face attached. So the people list is built by rules that refuse when unsure, and a lone nickname, the riskiest string of all, is written down as a clue but never asserted as a credit.

Part 02

One door for every new name

“Nair Schinca”the doorkeepernot-a-dancer lists · exact name ·alias · near spellingclose enoughsame person, no new rowtoo close to calla person decides, not a thresholda new personhidden until reviewed“Nahir Schinca” is one letter away and the same person.The nearest fuzzy match for one world champion is a different world champion. So the middle exit exists.
A name arrivesFrom a title, a nightly search, a visitor, or a reviewer. Same door for all four.
The checksNot-a-dancer lists first, then exact, alias, and near spelling.
Three exitsJoin, ask, or create hidden. Refusing to decide is one of the answers.

Any similarity threshold is wrong most often right next to itself. The band where the doorkeeper refuses turns those cases into questions for a person instead of coin tosses, and a name that becomes a new person is kept off the site until someone has looked at it.

Part 03

Partners are counted, not typed

every night, redrawn from scratch412 shared videospartnership1 · a pairing973a video with four nameswould draw six lines, four falsedraws nothing until a person sorts itTwo or more shared videos is a partnership. One is a pairing: real, kept, not promoted.
Nobody types couplesEvery pair sharing a video becomes a line. The whole map is redrawn nightly.
Two is the barA festival's mixed-couples night makes twenty pairings and no partnerships. Correct.
Crowds draw nothingA circle of twelve dancers is not sixty-six partnerships.

The map is a by-product of the videos. Remove a video and the line it drew is gone the next night. Of 14,525 pairs who have shared a video, 5,559 are partnerships, and only those appear as “frequent partners” or as lines on the map in the next scene.

Part 04

Draw the scene once a night, then let people walk it

laid out at nighttwo seconds of physicsthe browser only draws90 most-filmed dancers · partnerships onlyclick a dancertheir neighbourhood, on demand“You might also like” on every dancer page is the same map: people one step away, ranked by shared partners.
Expensive onceThe layout takes seconds of computation, so it runs at night and is kept for a day.
Cheap foreverThe page ships coordinates. The browser draws; it never calculates.
WalkableClick anyone to see their partners, and their partners' partners.

No behavioural data and no model are involved in these recommendations. They are the lines the night job drew, read one hop out.

Part 05

Ninety-one certain names, and the keys to your own page

91 world champions, 2003 to todaytyped from the official results, each linked to a dancer by a person, never matched automaticallyWorld Champion · 2015a champion the rules cannot findis a bug with a name attached. Building the list found four.the dancer“this is me”proof via a linked account · one reviewtheir own facts: name, portrait, bio, tour datesoutrank every rule and every other usera credit they disputeshown as contested; a reviewer decides; never erasedA person outranks every rule about themselves. Nobody outranks the evidence about a performance.
Certain namesThe strongest credential in the domain, and a permanent test of the matcher.
Claim the pageProve control of a linked account, get reviewed once, own it for good.
Own the self, not the evidenceEdit who you are and where you will be. Dispute, never delete, what was filmed.

Tour dates an owner posts appear on their page, on each festival’s page, and in the weekly edition of everyone who follows them. What an owner cannot do is make a performance disappear, because the notebook belongs to everyone.

Take-aways, without the tango

  1. 01Model people as points with many strings attached, and grade the string that matched.
  2. 02One door for new entities, with a “too close to call” exit that asks a person.
  3. 03Count relationships from evidence on a schedule. Never hand-enter a graph you can derive.
  4. 04Certain lists are also tests. Link them by hand and fail loudly.
  5. 05Let the subject own the facts about themselves, and keep the evidence about events out of everyone’s reach.

The Cabeceo

We've caught your eye across the milonga. Like any good tango, this starts with consent — nothing optional runs until you say so. What we store