Reader Sigve I. thinks we should clean up Wikipedia. This is a good idea but would take up a lot of time. Some of our previous contributions include these entries.
In making this suggestion, Sigve sends us to the following chart about population growth (related to this entry):

The problems here are many. Starting with the detached chart titles: it takes a little while to realize that the graphical elements depict the share of population from 1950 to 2010 while the population growth is written in parentheses next to the legend while the third series of numbers displays the ranking -- not of growth, but of share of population -- among the continents or countries depicted.
That's quite a mouthful.
A forensic scientist is on call to tell us which software might have generated these charts. The telltale clue would be the padded "00.8%". This one can't be blamed on Excel since Excel always banish the padding (even if you deliberately put it there).
I won't mention the variety of chartjunk that serves no purpose. But I do want to point out that setting the year labels 15 years apart is wacky.
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Now, let's zoom in on the bottom chart. "10 most populated countries" is the title. Why does the vertical axis display proportions that add up to 100%? Surely, these 10 parts don't add up to a whole!
Even though this is not a pie chart for which this state of confusion is fairly routine (unfortunately), as we've even stumbled on examples in teaching materials for (gasp) numeracy, the same error can show up in stacked column or area charts.
Take a step back. Apart from the obvious fact that China followed by India are the two most populous countries by far, what insight is being conveyed by this chart?
Next, consider the following version:
On this one, we notice that the top 10 countries fall into roughly three types in terms of their growth trajectory since 1950. The green group has a parabolic growth pattern, with a growth rate that reaches an apex in the front part of this period; these countries all have slowing growth in the most recent decades.
The black group, which includes biggies like China, Russia, Japan and Brazil, has by and large experienced slowing growth throughout the time window. They are still growing but the growth rate has been declining.
Finally, USA stands alone as a country where the growth rate has been generally stable over much of this period.
The other thing to notice is that while most countries had similar growth rates back in the 50s, by 2010 these countries experience a much wider range of growth.
One of the tricks that help surface these trends is the smoothing applied to the data. The real data, as you may suspect, would not fall neatly into parabolas. Just for comparison, below is the same chart without smoothing. Nothing is lost by smoothing while the result is significantly cleaner.
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Growth rate is not the only thing of note. By focusing on growth rates, one loses the important fact that countries with larger populations contribute more to the growth of world population. The following chart displays this trend. Risking the ire of some, I elected to lump almost all the countries into one group -- there are indeed differences among these countries in terms of their growth trajectories but one cannot escape the conclusion that these differences are only drops in a large bucket.

Looks like Wikipedia needs some cleaning up. Who's pitching in?