Skip to main content

Correcting Wiki Charts: Mauthausen-Gusen

My third pick from the list of abhorrent Wiki charts mentioned by Jorge Camoes is the one from the page of Mauthausen-Gusen, originally a collection of villages of Mauthausen and Gusen in Upper Austria, which became one of the largest Nazi concentration camps by the summer of 1940 and the place of death of several hundred thousand inmates.

There are several reasons for finding this serving of pie unpalatable. Firstly because it is a "Pie Chart". This same data could be more easily and effectively displayed using a column or a stacked bar chart. Secondly, because it is an exploded pie chart. I prefer an exploded pie-chart where the exploded slice merits special attention from the rest. To otherwise create this type only succeeds in bringing a ragged look to an already poorly crafted chart. Third, and most importantly, the use of flags as legends and with it, the redundant use of data labels to state the name of the countries that is absolute chart junk! I'd either have the flags or the names as legends.

I've replaced the exploded pie-chart in favour of a 100% stacked-bar chart. Labelling the flags with the name of their nations didn't appeal to me much, hence the only labels in the chart are those showing the death percentage for every country.

This is my version of the Mauthausen-Gusen chart.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please do not post spam or promote your own site(s). Comments are moderated and such comments will not be published.

Also, please keep your comment relevant to the topic of the article.

Finally, please do not post any of your personally identifiable information such as phone number, email address or other important details as this is an open platform.

Popular posts from this blog

The Cricket Graphs: The Forgotten Chart

The fun of receiving feedback to blog posts is that one isn't quite sure what they might come up against. While mostly it provides fascinating discussions, insightful comments or explanatory questions, there is also the odd occasion when it throws up unusual requests. The other day I received an email in response to my post, The Cricket Graphs . The sender wanted me to create a "Partnership" chart, which would show the runs scored by the pair of batsmen for every wicket and the balls faced. I went searching for data on the Cricinfo website , and picked out the 3rd ODI  between the South African and Australian cricket teams which was played out in Kingsmead, Durban on October 28, 2011. The Partnership details were taken from the page titled Partnerships Table and the total balls faced by individual batsmen from the Scorecard. Constructing the graphs was a somewhat tricky affair, with two potential bar charts in two axes representing Balls and Runs, which had me w...
1 comment
Read more

Florence Nightingale Circumplex Chart

I was taken to the  Florence Nightingale's Wiki page   during a recent research, and one of the interesting things I noted was her contribution to statistics. It came to me as a pleasant surprise that she is credited with inventing the polar area diagram , or occasionally the Nightingale rose diagram, which is equivalent to a modern circular histogram. Following the completion of my project and in my weekend to spare, I devoted time to recreating the chart in Excel. It took a combination of Doughnut-Pie-and XY charts and close to four hours to finish it. The colours are a bit darker, the values are approximate and the labels differently oriented, yet the chart looks fairly close to the original as is shown by the picture below.
2 comments
Read more

US Open Tennis

Charting a sporting event is always great fun. More so, if that happens to be the vibrant US Open Tennis Championships which I came across in this piece . But to me, it appeared somewhat wayward and lacking purpose. Most of its charts could have been more efficiently represented through a table, and the only one which made some sense, or added some value was the one that depicted the US women’s singles champion by country over time (1900 - 2011). I decided to approach this from a different perspective. Firstly, I separated the amateur years from the Open era which began in 1968. From 1881-1911, the US Open used a challenge system whereby the defending champion automatically qualified for the next year's final, creating in the bargain, some unbelievable feats like Richard Sears remaining undefeated in the tournament and winning the inaugural seven editions of the Championships. Furthermore, the difficulty in travelling to and from the USA in the earlier years can also be attri...
Post a Comment
Read more