Five minutes with internet_pct in world-indicators

Someone asked what is in internet_pct on world-indicators, and the honest answer took one query.

720 rows, no nulls, 401 distinct values. Share of population using the internet.

The five-number version: min 0.52, p10 3.99, median 63.39, p90 97.00, max 97.00. The mean is 57.77.

The p10 to p90 band — 3.99 to 97.00 — is where ordinary rows live, and it is the pair worth quoting when somebody asks what to expect. Min and max describe the two strangest rows in the table and nothing else; they are useful for spotting impossible values and misleading for everything else.

select
  count(*)                       as rows,
  count(internet_pct)            as present,
  count(*) - count(internet_pct) as nulls,
  count(distinct internet_pct)   as distinct_values
from world_indicators;

Nothing dramatic: the mean and median are within 8.9% of each other, so an average is a fair summary. That is worth confirming rather than assuming — it is not true of most money columns.

Where this matters: a symmetric column is one you can average, threshold and chart without hedging, which makes it unusually cheap to work with. Knowing which of your columns are like this and which are not is most of knowing when to be careful.

The grain is one row per country per year, which is the context every one of those numbers depends on. None of them survive a change of grain, which is why "profile the column" and "profile the table" are the same job. Full schema, and the CSV, on the dataset page.