Summary: While their objectives are very different, humanitarian workers, and journalists working on armed conflict have a similar use of numerical data on conflict. In both cases, numbers are used to appeal to a specific audience: private donors for humanitarian workers, and readership for journalists. Yet, because of the competitive context in which these practitioners are put and the logics data circulation between both, this creates a self-sustaining system where the numbers produced and used are not specifically accurate nor particularly meaningful. Nevertheless, not only are both criteria are fundamental for the qualification of conflicts and wars, whose definitions are often linked to numerical thresholds; but these dynamics also contribute to normalizing the (mis)representation of armed conflicts in the eyes of the civil society and politicians, ultimately resulting in misallocations.