Claude
673f265398
Two new levers on a sin page. `wild[]` renders credited, linked specimens between the explanation and the citations — first the argument, then proof people actually publish this, then the sources. `related[]` cross-links neighbouring sins and is resolved at build, so a typo fails the build instead of shipping a dead link. Both arrive with the first specimen: a Hungarian primary graphic whose three slices read 38/22/19 — 79% — drawn as a full circle, so every share is inflated by about 1.27x. Measured off the image, the 38% slice occupies 173.6 degrees, or 48.3% of the pie. Our published pie sin is about too many slices, so it didn't cover this; "Pie Slices That Don't Sum to the Whole" is a new severity-5 page whose before/after is two pies differing only in whether the remainder is present. That sin is an omission, so `compareNote` replaces the standard "same numbers, both charts" line. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01ULE5RRxdQE1ebwefEd2eCM
3.1 KiB
title, summary, poke, category, severity, tags, badChart, fixedChart, date, related, citations
| title | summary | poke | category | severity | tags | badChart | fixedChart | date | related | citations | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| 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
A pie chart does one job, and does it well: showing that a handful of parts make up a whole — this slice is about half, that one about a quarter. Nothing else communicates "most of it" quite as fast.
Eight slices, several within a percentage point of each other, is not that job. Nobody can tell whether Firefox beats Samsung by eyeballing two thin wedges on opposite sides of the circle.
The chart type isn't the sin here — the workload is. Pies are not banned around here; this one was just asked to answer a question it can't answer.
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.
Worse, the reader doesn't feel like they're guessing. The chart looks exact, so a rank read off it gets quoted with a confidence nothing on the page earns.
The repentance
Match the form to the question you're actually asking.
If the point is "these few parts make up the whole," a pie with two or three slices says it instantly, and you should keep it. If the point is a ranking — which is what an eight-category breakdown nearly always is — use a sorted horizontal bar chart: one shared baseline, explicit order, and room for long labels beside their bars.
If you need the whole and the ranking, a sorted bar chart with the total stated in the title does both.