Claude
cd18862115
"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
2.1 KiB
title, summary, poke, category, severity, tags, badChart, fixedChart, date, citations
| title | summary | poke | category | severity | tags | badChart | fixedChart | date | citations | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Too Many Slices in a Pie Chart | Near-identical wedges nobody can rank by eye, when a sorted bar chart would have answered instantly. | More slices than anyone can rank by eye. A bar chart was right there. | Chart-Type Abuse | 3 |
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pie-overload-bad | pie-overload-fixed | 2026-08-05 |
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The sin
The pie chart asks the reader to compare angles — something people are genuinely bad at. One or two slices, fine. But eight slices, several of them within a percentage point of each other? Nobody can tell whether Firefox beats Samsung by eyeballing two thin wedges on opposite sides of the circle.
Why it deceives
Angle and area are hard to judge precisely, and slices scattered around the circle can't be lined up against a common baseline. The small categories blur into an indistinguishable fringe, and the ranking — usually the whole point — becomes guesswork.
The repentance
Use a sorted horizontal bar chart. Every value shares one baseline, the ordering is explicit, and long labels sit comfortably beside their bars. Reserve the pie for the rare case of two or three parts of an obvious whole — and even then, a bar chart rarely does worse.