{"$schema":"https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema","standard":"UW-1.0","name":"The Unrated Wildcard Standard","version":"1.0","status":"stable","published":"2026-08-26","canonical":"https://topelevens.com/standard/wildcard","abstract":"A specification for the eleventh slot on a ranked list: the provider the rubric structurally cannot surface, published without a score and explained by qualitative signal readings drawn from a public registry.","licence":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","condition":"Attribution: name the standard and link to the canonical spec URL."},"steward":{"name":"Top 11","url":"https://topelevens.com"},"rules":[{"id":"UW-1","level":"MUST","text":"A conforming list publishes exactly one wildcard entry, and that entry carries no score, rating, grade, star count or ranking position that can be compared numerically with the scored entries."},{"id":"UW-2","level":"MUST","text":"The wildcard answers a different question from the rubric. It names the provider that the list's own scoring criteria structurally cannot surface, not the provider that scored eleventh."},{"id":"UW-3","level":"MUST","text":"The wildcard is explained by between three and six signal readings drawn from a published signal registry. Each reading carries a qualitative value and one sentence of specific evidence."},{"id":"UW-4","level":"MUST NOT","text":"A signal reading may not be expressed as a number, a percentage or a score, and readings may not be averaged, weighted or combined into a composite value of any kind."},{"id":"UW-5","level":"MUST","text":"A conforming list states plainly who the wildcard is right for and who it is wrong for, naming a concrete buyer in each case."},{"id":"UW-6","level":"MUST NOT","text":"The wildcard position may not be sold, sponsored, exchanged for affiliate revenue, or offered in return for any consideration. A publisher that sells the slot is not conforming, whatever else it does."},{"id":"UW-7","level":"MUST","text":"Where the explanation was produced or assisted by a machine, the published entry says so. The standard permits machine judgement; it does not permit disguising it as measurement."},{"id":"UW-8","level":"MUST","text":"When the publisher's own model concludes a candidate does not qualify as a wildcard, the list is corrected rather than the justification rewritten. Publishing a non-qualifying wildcard with an invented reading is a conformance failure."},{"id":"UW-9","level":"SHOULD","text":"The wildcard entry is machine-readable: a structured block carrying the version, the verdict, the readings, and the right-for and wrong-for statements, at a stable URL."},{"id":"UW-10","level":"SHOULD","text":"A publisher extends the signal registry rather than replacing it, and publishes any signal it adds with the question it answers and the evidence it reads."},{"id":"UW-11","level":"MAY","text":"A publisher may display the conformance badge on any list that meets every MUST in this specification."}],"conformance_levels":[{"level":"Full","requires":"Every MUST and every SHOULD.","detail":"The wildcard is unrated, explained by registry signals with evidence, machine-readable at a stable URL, and never for sale."},{"level":"Core","requires":"Every MUST.","detail":"The wildcard is unrated and explained by registry signals, but is not published in machine-readable form."},{"level":"Non-conforming","requires":"Any MUST unmet.","detail":"Most commonly: the eleventh entry still carries a score, or the slot is sponsored. The badge may not be used."}],"entry_schema":"https://topelevens.com/standard/wildcard.schema.json","signal_registry":{"url":"https://topelevens.com/methodology/wildcard","version":"wildcard-v2.0","readings":["exceptional","strong","notable","mixed","weak"],"signals":[{"id":"impact_density","name":"Impact density","group":"money","question":"What does one unit of the outcome I actually want cost here, versus everywhere else?","reads":"Pricing pages, contract and overage terms, and customer accounts of what they got for what they paid, normalised into one comparable unit of outcome across seat, usage, project and retainer pricing."},{"id":"quality_per_price_percentile","name":"Quality-per-price percentile","group":"money","question":"Is this the best thing available at its price, regardless of where it ranks overall?","reads":"Every provider's measured quality signals plotted against its real price band, then the provider's position on the quality curve within that band alone."},{"id":"price_integrity_under_growth","name":"Price integrity under growth","group":"money","question":"What happens to my bill when my usage doubles?","reads":"Published tiers, overage clauses, minimum commitments and renewal accounts from customers who scaled, rebuilt into a cost curve rather than a starting price."},{"id":"lock_in_cost","name":"Lock-in cost","group":"money","question":"What will it cost me to leave, in work rather than in fees?","reads":"Export fidelity in the docs, data portability, notice and termination terms, plus migration accounts from customers who actually left."},{"id":"ttfv_drift","name":"Time-to-first-value drift","group":"service","question":"How far is the promised onboarding time from the one customers describe?","reads":"Vendor onboarding claims against dated customer accounts of when the thing first did something useful."},{"id":"support_half_life","name":"Support half-life","group":"service","question":"How fast does the quality of help fall off once I am no longer a new customer?","reads":"Support experiences in dated reviews and community threads, split by how long the customer had been paying."},{"id":"effort_transfer","name":"Effort transfer","group":"service","question":"How much of the work does this actually take off me, and how much does it hand back?","reads":"Implementation and maintenance burden in the docs, plus the job ads customers post to operate the tool after they buy it."},{"id":"founder_proximity","name":"Founder attention proximity","group":"service","question":"How close do I sit to the people who actually build this?","reads":"Who answers in public across forums, issue trackers, community channels and social: the founder, an engineer, or a support tier."},{"id":"incident_candour","name":"Incident candour","group":"service","question":"How does this vendor behave on its worst day?","reads":"Status page history and post-mortems: how fast they admit, how specific they are about cause, and whether the fix was named."},{"id":"promise_practice_gap","name":"Promise-to-practice gap","group":"truth","question":"Which marketing claims does the documentation actually support?","reads":"Every capability claim on the marketing site, matched against the documentation, API reference and release notes that would have to exist for it to be true."},{"id":"documentation_truth_ratio","name":"Documentation truth ratio","group":"truth","question":"How much of the documentation is current and correct rather than aspirational?","reads":"Doc freshness dates, deprecated endpoints, examples that no longer match the current API, and gaps where a documented feature has no reference."},{"id":"review_authenticity_weighting","name":"Review authenticity weighting","group":"truth","question":"What do the reviews say once the incentivised and templated ones stop counting?","reads":"Review corpora weighted by how much each review reads as lived, specific experience rather than prompted, reciprocated or templated text."},{"id":"churn_language_signature","name":"Churn language signature","group":"truth","question":"Why do people leave, as opposed to how many complain?","reads":"The structure of leaving accounts: what broke the relationship, at what stage, and whether the same fracture repeats across customers."},{"id":"buyer_regret_window","name":"Buyer regret window","group":"truth","question":"When in the relationship does dissatisfaction usually show up?","reads":"Dated customer accounts mapped to tenure, to find whether pain clusters in week one, month six, or at renewal."},{"id":"roadmap_honesty","name":"Roadmap honesty index","group":"trajectory","question":"Of what they publicly promised, how much shipped?","reads":"Two years of public commitments against changelogs, release notes and shipped documentation."},{"id":"hiring_trajectory","name":"Hiring signal trajectory","group":"trajectory","question":"Where is this product actually going in the next twelve months?","reads":"The vendor's own job ads: which functions are being staffed, which are being quietly wound down, and what that implies about the roadmap."},{"id":"sustained_attention","name":"Sustained attention","group":"trajectory","question":"Is the specific thing I need still being worked on, or just the headline product?","reads":"Release, commit and documentation activity scoped to the individual capability the buyer cares about, not to the product overall."},{"id":"ceiling_distance","name":"Ceiling distance","group":"fit","question":"How long before I outgrow this?","reads":"The shape of complaints at each customer-size band, to find the size at which the product starts to strain."},{"id":"category_fit_anomaly","name":"Category fit anomaly","group":"fit","question":"How different is this from the category's dominant architecture, and is the difference an advantage?","reads":"The structural pattern every other provider shares, and where this one departs from it, then whether that departure serves a definable buyer."},{"id":"under_the_radar","name":"Under-the-radar coefficient","group":"fit","question":"How much better is this than its share of voice suggests?","reads":"Measured quality signals against market awareness: search demand, mentions, review volume and category presence."}]},"badge":{"svg":"https://topelevens.com/standard/badge.svg","html":"\"Conforms"},"adopters":[{"name":"Top 11","url":"https://topelevens.com","since":"2026-08-26","level":"Full","note":"Steward of the standard. 270 rankings conforming, implementation wildcard-v2.0."}]}