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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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# The Economist — "Mistakes, we've drawn a few"
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Sarah Leo, visual data journalist at The Economist. Supplied as PDF, read
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2026-08-05. Answers queue row 4 (content; the canonical URL is still missing)
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and settles claim **V1**.
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Structure: her own archive, grouped into charts that are (1) misleading,
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(2) confusing, (3) failing to make a point, each with a redesign at comparable
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size.
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## V1 — confirmed, but our note over-claimed it
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The article's **first** example is `Mistake: Truncating the scale` — a bar chart
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of average Facebook likes on posts by the political left:
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> The original chart not only downplays the number of Mr Corbyn's likes but also
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> exaggerates those on other posts.
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So the sin is there, and it leads the piece. But it is **one** example, not the
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"several" our citation note claimed. Note corrected to match. (She does add
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that "avid followers of this blog will have seen another example of this bad
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practice," which is a pointer elsewhere, not a second case here.)
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## Unexpected: it contains our dual-axis sin, self-caught
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`Mistake: Forcing a relationship by cherry-picking scales` — dog weights against
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neck sizes, on a dual axis, looking perfectly correlated:
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> In the original chart, both scales decrease by three units (from 21 to 18 on
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> the left; from 45 to 42 on the right). In percentage terms, the left scale
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> decreases by 14% while the right goes down by 7%.
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Her takeaway is quotable and close to our page's:
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> if two series follow each other too closely, it is probably a good idea to
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> have a closer look at the scales.
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Added as a citation on `dual-axis-correlation`. A newsroom catching itself doing
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the exact thing is stronger evidence than a textbook saying not to.
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## Also useful
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- `Taking the "mind-stretch" a little too far` — trade deficit vs manufacturing
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employment, where "the two data series don't share a common baseline. The
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baseline of the trade deficit is at the top of the chart." Adjacent to our
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inverted-axis sin without being a case of it; cite carefully if at all.
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- `Including too much detail` ("What a rainbow!") — stacked areas for ten
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countries. Her point that "since we are not plotting all euro-area countries
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it doesn't make any sense to stack the data" is a good detail for the stacked
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backlog entry: stacking implies the parts are the whole.
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- She cites Francis Gagnon's rule of thumb — leave at least 33% of the plot area
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free under a line chart that doesn't start at zero. No source captured; not
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cited anywhere yet.
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