WTF Visualizations
viz.wtf
A crowdsourced gallery of confusing, misleading, and badly designed data visualizations — truncated axes, 3D pie charts, dual scales, and charts that actively contradict their own headlines.
WTF Visualizations is a gallery of charts and graphs that are confusing, misleading or just badly designed. Typical examples include truncated axes that exaggerate small differences, 3D pie charts, dual scales and graphs that contradict their own headlines.
It works as a lesson in data literacy: seeing a bad chart explained is the quickest way to learn to spot one. It is useful for teachers, journalists and anyone who reads statistics in the news. Entries are submitted by the community, so the examples keep coming.
Why it is useful
Teaches data visualization literacy through memorable counterexamples. Seeing concrete examples of how charts mislead — a bar chart starting at 99% to make 1% look enormous, a 3D pie chart that obscures the relative sizes — makes you much better at spotting manipulation in media and avoiding the same mistakes in your own work. Also genuinely entertaining; some submissions are spectacularly, almost admirably wrong.
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