Rankings

The City Index describes cities. This section puts them in order, which is the ruder thing to do and the one you came here for.

An ordered list is a stronger claim than a description, so every ranking names the measure it sorts on, the date it was computed and the method behind it. That is not throat-clearing. A list headed “the best cities for nightlife” with no stated criterion is an opinion wearing a number, and you have read a hundred of those already.

City rankings, dimension by dimension

Each of the six City Index dimensions produces its own table. They disagree with each other. That is the useful part.

The city at the top of the nightlife column is almost never at the top of the privacy one, and a reader who came for privacy is badly served by nightlife. Somewhere in that disagreement is the city you actually want, and it is rarely the one that wins the loudest table.

We publish by dimension, by region, and combined into the World Class Score. The weighting behind the combined table sits in our editorial standards, because a composite score is the easiest place on any site to hide a thumb on the scale.

The World Class 100

A ranked list of the fictional characters in Profiles, ordered by how readers vote between them.

Every character is invented and every image is generated. They depict no real person, and they are not offered, advertised or available for anything. That is stated on each profile as well as here, because a ranking of people who look real and are not is exactly the sort of thing worth saying twice.

The list moves. Votes are pairwise, one character put against another; results are rated against each other rather than counted in isolation, and the tables are recomputed on a schedule rather than live. So nothing climbs because somebody sat refreshing it at three in the morning. There are national and regional cuts alongside the global list.

What we do not rank

We do not rank real people by appearance, and we do not rank businesses.

Ranking real individuals on their looks, without their participation, is not something we are prepared to publish, however well it would perform. Ranking operators would require us to verify claims we have no way of verifying.

City scores and invented characters are what is left. We can stand behind both, because we made both.

Definitions for the terms used in these tables are in the Encyclopedia.