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Work the five delivered sources into the pages
The source-request loop paid for itself immediately — two of the five corrected something rather than confirming it. The Economist piece settles V1, the riskiest live claim, but our note had over-claimed: truncating the scale is its *first* example, not one of "several." Note rewritten to quote her. The same article turned out to contain a dual-axis chart she caught herself on, now cited. Datawrapper's color-scale part 1 refuted the assumption behind a queued sin outright: it makes no argument against rainbow scales and endorses multi-hue sequential gradients. The rainbow entry is now marked as having no verified source at all, rather than ample backing. The dual-axis post independently draws the same line we drew last turn — of four uses only the alternative-scale case survives, their example being F against C — and led to two references worth more than the blog post: the Isenberg et al. study that tested dual-scale charts, and Few's article working through the cases. Both ship without full metadata rather than guessed metadata; queued. Pie and stacked posts gave verbatim support, plus one correction: a 100%-stacked chart has two readable baselines, not one. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
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@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@ runs 2–5 on purpose.
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## Sources in play
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`src/lib/references.ts` currently holds 22 entries, 18 of them cited by the five
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`src/lib/references.ts` currently holds 24 entries, 20 of them cited by the five
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published sins. This table is a **convenience, not a scoreboard** — it's here so
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you can spot a source that fits a sin you're drafting, not so we can drive the
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right-hand column to zero blanks. An uncited reference is not a debt.
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@@ -31,9 +31,10 @@ seven sources, give it seven and add whatever's missing to the file.
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| `healy` | — |
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| `munzner` | — |
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| `schwabish` | — |
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| `datawrapper` | dual-axis-correlation |
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| `fewdualaxes` | dual-axis-correlation |
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| `fewpies` | too-many-pie-slices |
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| `huff` | truncated-y-axis |
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| `isenberg2011` | dual-axis-correlation |
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| `shapeparameter` | aspect-ratio |
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| `showmenumbers` | too-many-pie-slices |
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| `spurious` | dual-axis-correlation |
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@@ -42,12 +43,13 @@ seven sources, give it seven and add whatever's missing to the file.
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| `vizwtf` | inverted-y-axis |
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| `callingbullshit` | inverted-y-axis, truncated-y-axis |
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| `datatoviz` | dual-axis-correlation, too-many-pie-slices |
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| `datawrapper` | dual-axis-correlation, too-many-pie-slices |
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| `eagereyes` | aspect-ratio, too-many-pie-slices |
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| `economistmistakes` | inverted-y-axis, truncated-y-axis |
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| `junkcharts` | inverted-y-axis, too-many-pie-slices |
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| `truthfulart` | aspect-ratio, dual-axis-correlation |
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| `wilke` | too-many-pie-slices, truncated-y-axis |
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| `clevelandmcgill` | aspect-ratio, too-many-pie-slices, truncated-y-axis |
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| `economistmistakes` | dual-axis-correlation, inverted-y-axis, truncated-y-axis |
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| `howchartslie` | aspect-ratio, dual-axis-correlation, inverted-y-axis, truncated-y-axis |
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The citation lists in each entry below are **starting points, not budgets** —
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@@ -90,8 +92,10 @@ meeting.
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circle. Fixed = bar chart, one bar per option, each labelled "% of respondents"
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with the base stated. Same counts.
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**Citations:** `fewpies`, `datawrapper` (their pie-chart guidance covers when the
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form applies at all), `datatoviz`, `junkcharts`.
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**Citations:** `fewpies`, `datawrapper` — but only for the premise: their
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pie-chart post says "one pie chart can only show one total and its shares," and
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it does *not* separately argue that parts must be mutually exclusive. Don't
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stretch it further than that. Plus `datatoviz`, `junkcharts`.
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### 3. A Pie Chart of Rates or Averages — *Impossible Wholes*, severity 5
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@@ -113,7 +117,8 @@ their metric is, not a counting mistake.
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same averages, plus the volume behind each one so the weighting is visible.
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**Citations:** `fewpies`, `munzner` (part-to-whole is a composition of a whole,
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or it is nothing), `schwabish`, `ftvisvocab`.
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or it is nothing), `datawrapper` (same one-total premise as above), `schwabish`,
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`ftvisvocab`.
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### 4. Group Averages Shown Without the Distribution — *Hiding the Data*, severity 4
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@@ -149,14 +154,20 @@ position does the work.
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measure against. The rest are guesses."
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In a stacked column chart, every segment except the bottom one starts at a
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baseline that moves from column to column, so readers can compare the total and
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the bottom series — and nothing else. The series you actually care about is
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usually floating somewhere in the middle. Datawrapper's guidance is blunt about
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it: bring the most important value to the bottom, because readers can only
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compare values that share a baseline.
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baseline that moves from column to column. Datawrapper puts it plainly: "It's
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hard for readers to compare columns that don't start at the same baseline," and
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their fix is to "bring the most important value to the bottom of the chart."
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One correction to how I first framed this, from reading their post: a
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100%-stacked chart has **two** readable baselines, not one — the top edge works
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as well as the bottom. So the sin isn't "only the bottom is readable," it's that
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everything *between* the two baselines floats. Write it that way; adjust the
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poke accordingly.
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Ubiquitous in business dashboards, which is what earns it a slot despite the
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milder severity.
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milder severity. The Economist's own rainbow-stack example is a good second
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angle: they stacked a selection of euro-area countries, and stacking implies the
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parts are the whole.
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**Charts:** bad = stacked columns with the interesting series stranded in the
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middle. Fixed = the same numbers as small multiples (or the key series pulled
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@@ -189,12 +200,15 @@ rediscovering them:
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- **Counts on a choropleth instead of rates** (Cairo's set-piece) — needs
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TopoJSON geometry and a build-time data dependency we don't have yet. Strong
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candidate the moment we take that on.
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- **Rainbow color scales for continuous data** (Wilke, Munzner, and Datawrapper's
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four-part color-scale series — the best free treatment of this anywhere) —
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sourcing is not the constraint. What still blocks it is ours: the
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fixed chart needs a sequential ramp validated on `--chart-canvas` in both
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themes. Do the palette work first (`dataviz` skill + its validator), then this
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is ready to write.
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- **Rainbow color scales for continuous data** — blocked on **both** counts,
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and I had this wrong before. Part 1 of Datawrapper's color series turned out
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to be a taxonomy that makes no argument against rainbow scales at all, and it
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explicitly endorses multi-hue sequential gradients (see
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`docs/sources/datawrapper-color-scales.md`). So we currently have *no*
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verified source for the rainbow critique — parts 2–4 and Kosara's "How The
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Rainbow Color Map Misleads" are queued. The palette work is still outstanding
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too: the fixed chart needs a sequential ramp validated on `--chart-canvas` in
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both themes. Don't draft this one until a real source is in hand.
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## Conventions reminder
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