Is "You're not a Jedi" telling it straight?

There have been a lot of tweets going round about the You're not a Jedi page that while quite rightly saying it is better to be honest on the census, however it is also suggesting:

Every tick towards any religion, no matter if it is real or a bit of a joke (or both for that matter), gets counted towards the figures of religious people in the UK.

I fully support the need for an accurate an inclusive census as the data is used in important ways such as apportioning money. This is why despite important and worthy claims about privacy concerns and private contracts I am on board for it. But something rang untrue about the claim that Jedis were being used in order to fund religious groups. So I went to look at the numbers for the 2001 census, the ONS commentary page on the England and Wales data says:

At the time the Census was carried out, there was an internet campaign that encouraged people to answer the religion question "Jedi Knight". The number of people who stated Jedi was 390,000 (0.7 per cent of the population).

Below is the raw data pulled out of nomis and it shows that unless Jedi was characterised as a sect of Christianity or Islam anyone who put that as their religious preference was put under “No religion” or “Religion not stated” they wouldn’t fit anywhere else (unless there are only about 150,000 Hindus and they lumped them in there).

Cell	England	Wales	England and Wales
T53:1 (ALL PEOPLE : ALL PEOPLE )	49,138,831	2,903,085	52,041,916
T53:2 (ALL PEOPLE : Christian )	35,251,244	2,087,242	37,338,486
T53:3 (ALL PEOPLE : Buddhist )	139,046	5,407	144,453
T53:4 (ALL PEOPLE : Hindu )	546,982	5,439	552,421
T53:5 (ALL PEOPLE : Jewish )	257,671	2,256	259,927
T53:6 (ALL PEOPLE : Muslim )	1,524,887	21,739	1,546,626
T53:7 (ALL PEOPLE : Sikh )	327,343	2,015	329,358
T53:8 (ALL PEOPLE : Any other religion )	143,811	6,909	150,720
T53:9 (ALL PEOPLE : No religion )	7,171,332	537,935	7,709,267
T53:10 (ALL PEOPLE : Religion not stated )	3,776,515	234,143	4,010,658

So if you are a group who believe that statistics are being used to disproportionately support the religious over the secular I would think it would be effort better spent working on finding out how many of the 37 million who put “Christian” down on the census are doing so out of force of habit.

Media oversight from the unexpected angle.

Much has been written about how the Daily Show with Jon Stewart can often be the hardest hitting political show on the American networks despite being produced by and aired on a cable comedy channel. In terms of television output luminaries such as Marcus Brigstocke and Iain Lee & Daisy Donovan have tried to mine the vein of satirical current affairs but none of them have worried Jeremy Paxman and television satire in this country remains mostly the preserve of impressionists and panel games.

There is one area in this country in which a programme you might not expect is doing a fine job at holding people to account. More or Less goes out on Radio 4 after the World at One on a Friday lunchtime and is a co-production with the Open University. This seemingly unassuming half hour of statistics can be (glibly) described as doing for numbers what Ben Goldacre does for medicine. While not the first important figure they have picked apart (there is a very good piece about how many CCTV cameras there are in the UK for example) they hit the geek headlines over the weekend over "7m illegal file sharers". After first finding out that the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property was quoting a figure that came out of unpublished research commissioned for the BPI which had been laundered through another report from the same research outfit via UCL they then examined the methodology and numbers from which it was derived which brought both the small sample size and seemingly overstated overall population figure under scrutiny.

The programme is also blessed in that it has its archive online going back to 2003 so the good work can be cited.