The ultimate ranking of the best German proverbs, crowdsourced and processed with a simple elo algorithm.
The idea came up after a wonderful law student that I never saw again used a German proverb that was so perfect to me that it sent me down a proverb rabbithole. I became convinced that it would be necessary to have the answer to life, the universe and everything, answered scientifically. Everything being the best German proverb, of course.
I built the frontend using vuejs, the backend with python flask and the db is a simple postgresql db. The code is open source and on my github.
Getting the data was pretty difficult because there unexpectedly was no official German dataset available. I ended up using the wiktionary one, which was painstakingly cleaned up, filled with explanations and matched with material icons by Gemini with its huge context window. It was surprisingly hard to get it to actually go through all 750+ proverbs, but after some careful prompting it did its job pretty well.