Mapping Kidnappings in Nigeria (Updated) by Mona Chalabi.
From the post:
Editor’s note (May 16, 3:35 p.m.): This article contains many errors, some of them fundamental to the analysis.
The article repeatedly refers to the number and location of kidnappings. But the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) — the data source for the article — is a repository of media reports, not discrete events. As such, we should only have referred to “media reports of kidnappings,” not kidnappings.
This mistake led to other problems.
We should not have published an animated map showing “kidnappings” over time, or even “media reports of kidnappings” over time. Because we have no data on actual kidnappings, showing a time series requires normalizing the data to account for the increasing number of media reports overall. Thus, showing individual media reports is a mistake. The second map, showing “Kidnapping rate per 100,000 people, 1982-present,” has the same flaw.
This is a good example of why you should have a high degree of confidence in FiveThirtyEight.
Yes, the blog post admits to a number of errors but you should also note:
FiveThirtyEight made the correction before the original article. You can’t see the mis-information without seeing the correction.
FiveThirtyEight did not spend days or weeks in denial, only to have to confess in the end to being wrong. (Any recent American President would be a study in contrast.)
FiveThirtyEight tells us what went wrong. Good for them and us because now we are both aware of that type of error.
In the unlikely event that you should ever make a public mistake, ;-), please consider following the example of FiveThirtyEight.
I first saw this in a tweet by Christopher Phipps.