Some time ago, Jorge Camoes posted about bad charts in Wikipedia and rallied for changes to be made to some truly horrific examples of bad charting.  Last night whilst browsing I noticed a few examples myself and decided to make a start, as some of the examples provided by Jorge still hadn’t been changed.

The entry on Throughput Accounting contained this beauty:-

3d bars and general junk make this a typical bad chart.  I spent an hour or so trying to fix it up a bit.  I’m no expert on accounting, so I just rearranged things a little and tried to make things look clearer and simpler.  No 3d, clearer labelling and re-ordering of the axes resulted in this:-

It’s still not perfect,  but so much better than the original, or at least I think so.  It’s a start, anyway.  Your comments are more than welcome.

Additionally, I wholeheartedly recommend that you also seek out more examples of bad charting and do something to fix them up to make charts on Wikipedia more consistent and junk-free.