explain xkcd:Explanation Improvement Project/Successful nominations
- See also the /Unsuccessful nominations.
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This is an archive of past discussions about explain xkcd:Explanation Improvement Project and is kept for historical purposes. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current discussion page. |
Criteria
The Explanation Improvement Project is primarily focused on improving existing explanations while also helping create new editors. Ideal candidates for This Week's Explanation for Improvement are:
1. In need of significant improvement, with an extensive scope for expansion. Short explanations (view list of shortest explanations) are often the most ideal for improvement, but longer explanations also qualify if they fail to explain the joke and are written poorly. Good concise explanations about quick and straightforward jokes should remain short, so evaluate explanations on overall quality rather than length.
2. Accessible to a broad audience or otherwise ideal for new editors. The week-long collaborative format of this project (edit-a-thon) works best for comics about relatable topics. Explanations about niche or highly technical jokes, as well as those detailing the inner workings of the comic, usually belong in the general incomplete explanations backlog instead.
3. Old or out of date. While not required, an explanation is usually a good candidate if it predates the creation of this wiki or if it needs to be updated to reflect newly available information (such as future predictions coming true). Starting from the release of comic 1079 in 2012, new explanations were featured on the Main Page for several days and are generally higher-quality as a result. Particularly, recent comics from the last few years are almost never nominated.
Past successful nominations
2026
August 2026
| 380: Emoticon | |||||||
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A basilisk, originating in Greco-Roman antiquity, is a legendary creature reputed to have the power to kill, or turn to stone, any living creature with a single glance (a useful idea for metaphor, as in Shakespeare's Richard III, in which a widow wishes her eyes, praised for their beauty by her husband's killer, were basilisks and could "strike [him] dead"). In this comic Cueball doesn't appear to be turned to stone, he simply appears to have died. Cueball, who goes by "NICKM", chats online with a user named "BSLSK05" via instant messaging. He quickly learns, much to his dismay, that he is chatting with an actual basilisk, who kills him by texting him a smiley emoticon (a colon and a closing parenthesis: The username "BSLSK05" has a common form for internet usernames of a group of alphabetical characters followed by some numerical characters. Most systems disallow the same username for different users, so users often append digits to their name in order to create something unique. These may be digits that have some significance to them, or simply an arbitrary string. However, in this case it likely represents basiliskos (βασιλίσκος), the Ancient Greek word for "basilisk" with the digits being a 'disguised' 'O' and 'S'. The myth of the basilisk has been adapted into many places in popular culture which the comic may be referencing, rather than the original myth directly. In this comic, Cueball is explicitly not referred to as Rob, since his username implies that he goes by "Nick" (possibly short for "Nicholas") and has a family name starting with "M". This may be a reference to the character Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, also known as "Nearly Headless Nick", from the novel and movie series Harry Potter. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, a basilisk is let loose in Hogwarts School of Wizardry, and Nearly Headless Nick becomes a victim of the basilisk's gaze. However, since he is a ghost and has already died, he is instead rendered immobile, or in the book, "petrified". (Another possible reference is the Basilisk monster from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Here, the Basilisk is a monster with the special ability "Petrifying Gaze".) Cueball's question, "A/S/L?", is an online messaging shorthand for requesting information about someone — specifically their age, sex, and location. This was commonly used when first meeting someone online in text-only mediums, especially in determining how they might wish to continue to converse with their correspondent (whether it might lead to online flirting or finding some other interesting topic of conversation). However, in some contexts, the question was considered creepy, inappropriate or disruptive. For people who were only interested in talking with existing friends or talking about a specific topic, dealing with unsolicited private messages asking "A/S/L?" was generally an annoyance. Such people may have wished for a way to make the questioner go away, though most would not have resorted to petrification to do so. The term has largely fallen out of use since the comic, with the introduction of avatars, profile pictures, and other methods of presenting a user's identity up front. Modern dating sites such as Tinder have built-in algorithms that automatically connect people whose preferences match, skipping the basic introduction stage of a first-time interaction entirely. The type of chat system pictured may be Internet Relay Chat (IRC), the earliest popular system used for instant messaging, as most IRC clients share the use of formatting usernames with surrounding angle brackets and prefixing event messages with " The title text refers to the Unicode character at code point
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Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:42, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- This is amazing! It has a relatively deep but simple joke, a weak explanation, and a reference to an old internet custom! FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 08:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 08:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Archived. FaviFake (talk) 11:03, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
September 2026
| 331: Photoshops | |||||||||
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This comic is part of the My Hobby series. It plays on the internet meme "This Looks Shopped". In the comic, Cueball states that his hobby is insisting that real-life items can be digitally manipulated, even though it is generally not possible to do this to actual physical objects outside of a computer.[citation needed] The comic then demonstrates an example of this hobby: Megan claims that the sabre she found is a 19th-century heirloom, but Cueball insists that the sabre "looks photoshopped", implying that it looks like it has been edited via image editing software. It is unclear whether he is doing this with the intent of irritating Megan, or whether he is just enjoying surrealist humour without intent to annoy. The description of "insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped" implies that Cueball is aware that physical objects cannot be altered in Photoshop. Continuing the joke, Cueball then goes on to rationalise his insistence that the sabre is photoshopped by explaining, "Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped." This is also likely to be a direct reference to the internet meme "This Looks Shopped", which often utilises phrases such as "I can tell by the pixels". Digitally edited images can show errors which reveal that the image is not true to life - shadows which don't align with the direction of the light in the image, reflections that don't match the surroundings they are reflecting, or individual pixels where the colours do not align with the rest of the image. Phrases such as "I can tell by the pixels" are a reference to this trait. If Cueball was sincere in his statement about reflections then it would be a bizarre claim to make, because real world objects generally cannot cast "wrong" reflections, unlike a digitally manipulated image. Alternatively, calling the artifact "photoshopped" could be Cueball's way of suggesting that the item is a fake or a replica, such as it being a 3D printed model of the stated object rather than a historical family heirloom. The joke could be a reference to the paranoia some internet users have when trying to discern whether images online are real or edited, suggesting that this behaviour might extend into real-life situations such as mistaking actual physical objects as "photoshopped" edits. The title text contains a more obvious reference to the internet meme, the complete text of which is: "THIS LOOKS SHOPPED / I CAN TELL FROM SOME OF THE PIXELS AND FROM SEEING QUITE A FEW SHOPS IN MY TIME." Most people have seen this from the popular image file format JPEG, which uses an image compression algorithm that works by converting an image's color data into small blocks, changing those blocks into cosine frequency patterns, rounding off details human eyes cannot see easily, and packing the final data tightly. This works remarkably well, but can sometimes leave artifacts (noticeable distortions or errors in the image) that are visible when zooming in far enough. Cueball is treating Megan's eyes as literal digital images on a screen, claiming that he can tell that he and Megan are "wrong for each other" based on the supposed JPEG artifacts and pixels her eyes are made of. Seeing "something in someone's eyes" that indicates that two people are wrong for each other is a common poetic/clichéd expression for the experience of one person suddenly recognising, from something in the other person's expressions or wider demeanor, that the relationship will not work between them. This is normally based on recognising incompatibilities (or a simple lack of attraction) based on the other person's behaviour, attitudes or priorities; it is not usually based on the physical appearance of their irises. Photoshop and internet cultureAdobe Photoshop is a popular image editing application first launched in 1990, which reached its peak popularity around the 2000s, when it was considered the industry standard for editing graphics. Adobe Photoshop is still considered a prominent image editing service (as of 2026), but has since lost its monopoly in the market. The verb "photoshop" (as in "to photoshop") is a verbalization/denominalization (informally known as verbing) of the noun "Photoshop", referring to the act of using editing software to digitally alter an image. Its derived adjective "photoshopped" and its shortened version "shopped" are applied to an image that has been manipulated in this way. This editing or "photoshopping" is often performed for marketing purposes to make an image look more appealing or dramatic, or to combine two or more images into a single seamles picture via image compositing rather than needing to capture all elements of an image in a single photo. The deliberate image manipulation or altering of images has also been used to mislead people into believing an edited or created image is "real" (an unedited photograph taken from life) and showing a true object or scenario. This is widely seen in the beauty industry [1]. In internet culture, this deliberate "photoshopping" or altering of images is sometimes used to for humour by making falsified scenarios, such as editing an image of a person to making someone look like they're holding a rapier when in reality, they were not holding one in the original photograph. Humorous use of "photoshopping" (image editing) can be simply to create an image that others may find funny, without an intent to mislead the audience into believing the image is unedited. However, it may also be done with the intent to trick the viewer into believing the image is "real" (unedited), where the creator derives humour from misleading the viewer. Parallels with Generative AIThis comic also unintentionally[citation needed] foreshadowed the rising and unavoidable presence of AI image creation/editing online, which began several years after the comic's publication. Manipulating images on social media to create misleading content has remained commonplace, though the techniques most often used (Photoshop, AI image generation) have changed as technology has developed. Today (2026), people online often accuse content creators, businesses or websites of using images generated by AI rather than created by humans. Creating images and other content using AI is broadly frowned upon due to: a) AI aggregating images/content using material made by human artists without their consent and without paying the artists for their work; b) AI servers having a large detrimental impact on the environment; c) AI having no "creative intent" of its own, meaning the images generated by them have no inherent artistic meaning; and d) the output produced by AI often being low-quality, bland, uninspiring or inaccurately rendered. Identification of photoshopped images and AI images may both follow the same base principle of examining minute details for inconsistency. With photoshopped images, it can include inaccurate reflections (as mentioned by Cueball) and differences in quality in sections of the image;[actual citation needed] with AI, the best tell is inconsistencies with reality.
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Very short, and only does a surface graze of the topic. Parallels to AI image editing, anyone? 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 06:03, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
- This is a great one! I was about to say the same thing, it can be updated by better explaining the reference and to add modern parallels. FaviFake (talk) 19:36, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Archived but marked as still incomplete. Unfortunately it still needs some serious copy-editing. FaviFake (talk) 16:44, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
| 395: Morning | |||||||
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This comic plays on the idea that physical reality might be a simulation running inside a supercomputer. This idea has been explored in popular culture, as mentioned in the comic itself, but the second panel argues the revelation would still be a deeply existential horror if it were true. The first panel mentions The Matrix, a 1999 action movie where the main character Neo discovers that the world he thought he knew was actually a simulation being run by an army of robots, who keep the human race hypnotized inside the titular simulation. It is perhaps the most famous work of fiction to touch on the theme of reality being a simulation, and an easy cultural touchstone at the time this comic was written (thus Megan's claim "We've all seen" it). The reveal of her reality being a simulation comes when she sees "dead pixels" in the sky. In LCD screens, especially TFT LCD, a dead pixel is a pixel that does not work properly, usually set permanently as black, or as some other color. LCD screens were a more common standard when this comic was written, but have largely been supplanted by LED screens wherever possible. Megan realizes that the reality is a computer simulation when she sees dead pixels in the sky, indicating that what she sees is an LCD screen. In the last panel of the comic, there are three pixels — two red and one green — that look exactly like actual dead pixels. Note that the trees are not pixelated, meaning that only the sky is a giant LCD screen. Regarding the question in the first panel, "What resolution is life?" (by which "life" presumably means the "real world" or lived experience, not living biochemistry), the most scientifically meaningful response would involve Planck distance and Planck time, the smallest units of distance and time that time-space can be broken down into. These are the fundamental building blocks of the time-space around us, similar to pixels (picture elements) on a screen, or a bit (one-or-zero) of data. Datum. Data. Humans, of course, cannot perceive changes on that scale - our experience occurs at a much less fine-grained level, with the human eye having a resolution of about 576 megapixels. The comic could also be interpreted differently as a comic about getting old. The dead pixels could be floaters in Megan's eyes, which could have gotten weaker with age. The title text refers to common techniques for fixing a dead pixel. One way is to apply pressure and release it, which isn't possible for Megan due to the distance of the sky. Another is to make the area of the screen that the dead pixel is on change colors really quickly, which could happen if the day-night cycle was fast enough, or if the clouds overhead were sped up.
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This explanation is just seven sentences and three small paragraphs. It also doesn't explain the title text or first panel well enough. This has to be the most incomplete explanation that isn't marked as incomplete. YZ100 (talk) 20:55, 12 September 2026 (UTC)
Nomination successful. Jeez. You're right; if this comic were released today, its explanation would be at least several pages long! FaviFake (talk) 17:04, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 17:04, 13 September 2026 (UTC)
Archived but marked as still incomplete. Unfortunately one late suggestion from the talk page wasn't addressed. FaviFake (talk) 00:01, 21 September 2026 (UTC)
| 1066: Laundry | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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In the United States of America, college (or university) is the usual form of education following secondary education (e.g. high school). College life typically offers the student much more freedom in their habits, especially if they live in a dormitory. For many college students, this represents the first time they have had to do their own laundry, or at least the first time a parent isn't there to nag them into doing it properly. This comic is about how the laundry habits of such independent college students degrade over the course of time. In each panel, circles represent certain locations for clothes, while directed paths connect the locations, representing the movement of clothes. As such, each panel is a kind of graph. The black paths appear to represent the regular or usual movement of clothes, while the grey paths show the change from the previous graph and may represent the occasional/less frequent movement of (some) clothes.
An unmentioned possibility is that, when the student can't be bothered, they can simply continue to wear the same pair of clothes. This would decrease the work to zero, but would increase odor problems and be a detriment to personal hygiene. Another work-eliminating trend not mentioned is saving dirty laundry until visiting parents; however, this runs the risk of either being forced to wash all the garments at the parents' residence or getting a lecture.
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Short, relevant to the public, and I'm sure we could go way deeper into washing clothes and adjacent habits. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 21:32, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Wow, this simply doesn't even have an explanation at all. It's basically just a transcript in the wrong section. Great find! FaviFake (talk) 22:50, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
- Good pick here! Needs some help for sure Black Hat's Hat (talk) 03:08, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 08:16, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
- Yeah 47.225.213.200 17:54, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 00:08, 21 September 2026 (UTC)
Archived. FaviFake (talk) 16:59, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
| 172: Skateboarding is Not a Crime | |||||||
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The comic depicts multicolored lockers, often used in American high schools, gyms, or colleges, with one of them having the "Skateboarding is not a crime" sticker. Skateboarding culture emerged in the 1980s, especially among young people (high schoolers, college students) as a countercultural movement initially associated with the "punk" movement. In addition, because skateboarding can take place in public locations with railings and benches, many cities have adopted specific measures to either increase the difficulty of skateboarding (Skatestopper), or by trying to pass laws to prohibit the act of skateboarding in public parks. In addition to the stated public safety concerns of fast-moving skateboarders among pedestrians, many cities unfairly associate skateboarders with those who drink, do drugs, or engage in acts of juvenile delinquency, such as truancy or underage drinking. As a result, the skateboarding subculture has taken up the slogan "skateboarding is not a crime" as a protest against these restrictions from cities. This slogan began in 1987, and since then, several skateboard manufacturing companies have adopted it. At one point, the slogan was a countercultural push against those who would consider skateboarding to be a crime, but as the phrase became more popular (by 2006, the time at which the comic was posted), there was likely a backlash against the slogan. Perhaps some people, both within the community of skateboarders and outside, would consider this sticker to be obnoxious, or to appear to have a persecution complex. For instance, in this comic, the slogan is the *only* sticker displayed on these lockers, perhaps put there as a way of the locker owner trying to stand out, in a "not like the other girls" manner. Randall apparently really does not like these stickers, to the extent that he states that when he becomes president (a common expression that is equivalent to "If I were in charge, ..."), stickers bearing the phrase will be considered a felony, though skateboarding itself will still be legal. Actually implementing this in the US would be against the first amendment and would be unlikely to ever become a real law. Even if it did, the rule would be so trivial and disproportionate that it would be unlikely to be enforced. Still, some schools and other establishments ban or restrict stickers on lockers, and may use a similar rule. The title text comments on another protest phrase, "Arrest me, I'm a skateboarder", that Randall appears to hate even more than the first, potentially for the more confrontational tone of the message. It is unsurprising that he hates this phrase, as it has a similar message and tone.
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Short short. Intriguing, though slightly niche, and dated. 7amiþ moi · 💬 · 📊 05:55, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
- Agreed. We could explain more the controversy around skateboarding, and the stickers and similar occurrences Black Hat's Hat (talk) 19:53, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 11:02, 6 September 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 17:53, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
Archived. FaviFake (talk) 22:35, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
October 2026
| 186: Console Lines | |||||||
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This comic relates to video game consoles. At the time this comic was published, there were three major competing products: the PlayStation 3 by Sony, the Xbox 360 by Microsoft, and the Wii by Nintendo. The Wii was released on November 19, 2006, the day before this comic was published. It was Nintendo's 5th generation home console, succeeding the GameCube. When a game console gets released, fans are often seen queueing outside the stores or camping on the pavement in order to be among the first to get their hands on a console. The comic shows such a console camp and suggests that there are differences between the fan communities. While the fans waiting in line for a Sony or Microsoft product are very rude, the Nintendo fans are apologetic and try to comfort (that is to say, console) those who arrived too late to obtain a package. There is a cliché that Nintendo fans are nicer and more polite than fans of other consoles. This may be attributed to the fact that the Wii is targeted at children and families with children, while the PS3 and the Xbox are targeted at the more "serious gamer" market. Nintendo's demographic seems to have changed more recently, with newer Nintendo consoles (Switch & Switch 2) being targeted at all audiences, not just the younger age groups. Despite the changes Nintendo has implemented, elitism among Playstation, Xbox, and PC remains rampant. The comic may also contain a subtle pun on the fact that 'console' has two meanings. A game console (noun) is a device that allows you to play video games, taking control input from one or more users and displaying the progress of the game as video output. However, to console (verb) means to make someone feel better when they are upset, as those in the Wii queue are attempting to do for the latecomers. The title text primarily expresses Randall's distance from the console wars (he has never owned a game console before), but also indicates an inclination towards the Wii, which was known for its (at the time) innovative motion controls. The fact that he indicated that alongside this comic suggests that he may have been influenced by how he perceives the Nintendo fan community. Then again, maybe Randall is just unable to get a PS3 or Xbox because of the line situation illustrated here.
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The explanation is short and is pretty much a transcript; and it doesn't actually explain the joke No (talk) 02:14, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
- Support Indeed too short, and only touches the joke tangentially. Would be nice to see how well this aged.
7amiþ = moi.__init__(t, c)04:34, 30 September 2026 (UTC) - Support – The actual explanation is one sentence. So much left to explain! FaviFake (talk) 23:38, 30 September 2026 (UTC)
Nomination successful. FaviFake (talk) 22:29, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
Featured as This Week's Explanation for Improvement. FaviFake (talk) 22:34, 3 October 2026 (UTC)
Archived. FaviFake (talk) 12:09, 11 October 2026 (UTC)
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This is an archive of past discussions about explain xkcd:Explanation Improvement Project and is kept for historical purposes. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current discussion page. |






