About ANYSTAT

Where the numbers come from, and how they are checked

What ANYSTAT is

ANYSTAT publishes statistics as interactive charts: sports records, economic indicators, country rankings, technology, agriculture and culture. Every chart page shows the full numbers as a table, a written analysis of what they show and a note on how the figures were compiled. Where a chart has a named source, it is printed and linked on the page.

Rankings that change over time are also published as chart races, and the blog looks closer at what individual datasets say and what they leave out. Browsing is free and needs no account.

Where the numbers come from

Charts are built from published data. The main publishers we work from:

World Bank Open Data: population, economy, trade, energy and health indicators by country
UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAOSTAT): crop and livestock production
StatCounter and the Steam Hardware & Software Survey: browser, operating system and gaming hardware shares
UEFA, Basketball-Reference and official league and tournament records: sports statistics
TOP500: the world's most powerful supercomputers
Wikipedia reference lists, for all-time records compiled from many publishers. The chart says so and links the article, which cites the original sources.

Values are shown as the source reports them. Nothing is estimated, rescaled or filled in, and a series is not published if its definition changes partway through.

How a chart is checked

  • After import, the chart is compared back against its source: the number of entries, the years covered, and any totals that must add up, such as market shares that should sum to 100%.
  • The most recent year is checked line by line against the published source, to catch rows that went missing rather than only rows that are wrong.
  • Names that a source spells differently across years (a renamed club, a merged company, a country that changed its name) are merged by hand, and every merge is reviewed.
  • The written analysis is checked sentence by sentence against the data. Claims about why something happened are removed unless the source itself makes them.

Corrections

If a number does not match its source, tell us through the feedback form or at support@anystat.ai, with a link to the chart. We check it against the source and correct the chart.

When a whole batch of charts has turned out to be wrong, we have taken it down rather than leave it up, and republished only the charts we could rebuild from the source.

The free chart maker

ANYSTAT also has a free chart maker for your own data. Charts that visitors make there are theirs: we do not review them, and they are kept out of search engines.

Contact

Questions, data requests and corrections: the feedback form, or support@anystat.ai. For business enquiries, admin@anystat.ai.

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