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
Datawrapper's blog 403s, Medium is unreachable, JSTOR wants a session,
and a search snippet is a paraphrase rather than a source's words. The
failure mode is guessing, or silently writing a weaker page.
docs/source-requests.md now holds a fetch queue with the specific
question each link needs to answer, plus a register of claims already
live on the site that rest on recall rather than a page anyone opened —
starting with the riskiest, an inference about which mistakes the
Economist piece owns up to. docs/sources/ is the drop zone.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
The pie page argued the form was the problem ("asks the reader to
compare angles") and then conceded a narrow exception; the dual-axis
page named the form in its title and rated it severity 5. Both read as
blanket bans, which is not the position — and blanket bans are how
dataviz advice turns into the folklore we're trying to replace with
citations.
The pie page now says outright that the chart type isn't the sin, the
workload is, and keeps the pie for the job it does well. The dual-axis
page is retitled for the actual misuse, drops to severity 4, and gains
a section on when a second axis is legitimate — the test being whether
you chose the alignment yourself.
Adds a severity rubric to CLAUDE.md so this stays consistent: 5 is
reserved for charts with no honest reading, and a form with legitimate
uses caps at 4.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
"Canon" was leaking onto the public site — a nav item, a footer block, a
page title, a set of CSS class names. It was also driving content
decisions it had no business driving: the backlog was ordered around
which references were still unused, which is curation dressed up as
planning.
The page is now /references/, the list is documented as a bibliography
to grow rather than a canon to curate, and the backlog says plainly that
a sin earns a slot by being worth a page — sources are found to support
it, never the reverse.
Adds six sources (Cairo's Truthful Art, Few's Show Me the Numbers, the
Economist's audit of its own charts, Kosara's eagereyes, WTF
Visualizations, Datawrapper's dual-axis piece) and roughly doubles the
citations on the five published sins, to 5-7 each. Two of the new notes
point at sources that complicate our own position rather than back it.
The Economist essay ships without a URL rather than a guessed one.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
Writes two sins off the backlog. The inverted y-axis is the egregious
one: the fill hangs from the top and the line descends while the values
climb, with every element individually defensible. Aspect ratio is the
quiet one: same twelve numbers, same y-range, only the shape of the box
changes.
Adds Cleveland, McGill & McGill 1988 to the canon — banking to 45 comes
from the shape-parameter paper, not the 1984 ranking already cited, so
citing the latter for it would have misattributed the claim.
Also renames sin slugs to match their retitled pages, and rewrites the
summaries that had started echoing those titles.
Gives line-chart points their mark color explicitly; "point": true was
falling back to Vega's default blue on a red or green line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
Titles are scanned in the gallery and recognized in a link, so they
should say what the sin is rather than pun about it. Retitles the three
published sins and the backlog's working titles, and records the rule in
CLAUDE.md: the title names the problem, the poke carries the voice.
Filenames are untouched, so existing URLs still resolve.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
Its chart-type "what to consider" posts and four-part color-scale series
cover ground nothing else in the canon does. Adds a backlog entry it is
the leading authority on (stacked columns, where only the bottom series
shares a baseline), and closes the citation gap on the rainbow-color-scale
sin — that one now waits only on our own sequential-ramp validation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
Ranks the next six sins by working backwards from the references we
already vouch for: six of fifteen canon entries were uncited, and each
idle one points at a sin worth writing. Also records the candidates our
build-time Vega-Lite pipeline can't prove honestly yet, so we stop
rediscovering them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
Claude