Column · dated beats big
Any claim built on undated data is unfalsifiable in practice. You cannot go back and see whether the world looked different when it was collected, so you cannot distinguish a measurement from an impression.
Comparison. A figure with a date can be paired with the same figure from another date, and the pair is a fact about change. Without dates, every figure floats free of time and therefore of meaning.
Because size looks like rigour. But size and reliability are different axes, and a large undated dataset is a large unverifiable claim.
Publish the number, the date and the method. If those three cannot be published together, do not publish the number.
See the data this is built on
Open the snapshot