Thanks for your comments here and the many other posts you've made helping the rest of us start to understand statistics - I very much value your contributions.

If I had claimed some particular conclusion that could be drawn from these pictures, you'd be right that that conclusion wouldn't be very valid. And you're right that the pyramids (like any form of expression) foreground some things and background others. An even worse flaw is that the levels *are based on* the writeups so that obviously there will be more at the top - how could acolytes ever accumulate a large number of writeups? As soon as the poor Sisyphusian accolytes made a large number of posts (assuming non-zero XP on those posts) they would no longer be accolytes.

And agreed, the pyramids are not at all good for fine-level distinctions. What they show, and show very clearly is the general relationship of readers of PM to writers of PM: that about 4% of the registered users contribute close to 80% of the writeups (regardless of what level they were when they made the posts). As for the comparison of saints to the four groups below them - what my eye tells me is that they have roughly the same number of writeups but that there are three times as many in the friars-through-pontiffs group as there are saints.

Does my post represent anything more than eye-candy? Probably not, but hopefully a few people enjoyed it.