File talk:US Southwest Border Encounters.png

What is "another chart" with larger timespan?

@Superb Owl: What, specifically, is the "another chart" that you refer to in your 4 September upload comment, "restricted to just the dates not already covered by another chart". I'm not seeing a reason to restrict this chart to Dec 2023 - July 2024. (I'm planning an SVG chart of the wider timespan, in keeping with general Wikipedia conventions.) Please reply, thanks. RCraig09 (talk) 13:39, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

Looks like it's one of yours: Superb Owl (talk) 15:38, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

@Superb Owl: File:2000-_Border_apprehensions_at_southwest_border.svg has annual apprehensions for ~24 years. The present chart has monthly encounters for a few months. I'm planning a monthly SVG chart of the ~4-year timespan, in keeping with general Wikipedia conventions, and especially avoiding cherry-picking. RCraig09 (talk) 18:45, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

That's fine, I shortened mine as soon as I ran across yours since it was missing 2024 data. I am hoping to find a chart that shows encounters minus expulsions as that would be a more accurate reflection of immigration given that most of these cases are repeats due to Title 42 Superb Owl (talk) 20:15, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

@Superb Owl: I've just uploaded , which I think is more appropriate in all contexts for both formal and substantive (e.g., don't cherry-pick) reasons.

As unsolicited advice: since thousands of people will see charts in important articles, it's advisable to create high quality charts (with grid lines and concise legends when appropriate, etc.), make charts "friendly" (not stark or sterile) to lay encyclopedia readers, avoid long sourcing or explanatory text within the drawings themselves, cite sources by footnotes in captions of graphics when used in Wikipedia articles, add categories at the bottom of Wikimedia file description pages, etc. Doing so will make your work last longer, and save you time in the long run. RCraig09 (talk) 22:46, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

I actually do appreciate unsolicited advice as a new Wikipedia chartmaker so if you see any of my work, please don't hesitate to drop a message with your thoughts. I actually do not understand what gridlines contribute and am ambivalent about legends when it is redundant to the title but if I am missing something (am a minimalist when it comes to data viz). Will certainly be sure to add sources to captions in the ones I have made and will start to add categories as well (did not know about that!) Superb Owl (talk) 02:26, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

@Superb Owl: Gridlines help people align the tops of bars with quantities on the vertical axis—that's what quantitative charts are for. File:Arrests and Gotaways.png has far too much text. Conversely, the sparsely labeled months in File:Title 42 Expulsions.png make it hard to figure out the intervening months (compare with File:2020- Encounters at U.S. southwest border.svg which I just uploaded). RCraig09 (talk) 04:51, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

I see your point, especially on the X-axis when there are important chronological milestones discussed in the article though I hesitate to put Y-axis gridlines unless there is some important threshhold being discussed in the text as it might be excessive detail for showing a general trend (I do not imagine people are parsing whether something is 90,000 or 100,000 on a chart like this) Superb Owl (talk) 18:15, 7 September 2024 (UTC)