On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Has anyone been following the way editing has developed on the en-Wikipedia articles on the Haiti and Chile earthquakes? It looks quite different to me. For some reason, the editing has tailed off a lot on the Chile earthquake article (could the fact that the article was semi-protected for the past 5 days have anything to do with that?), but the editing on the Haiti earthquake article kept on going. Of course, the Haiti earthquake (rightly) got more press coverage, but our article on the Chile earthquake is not in a good state.
Compare the en-wiki article with the (es) Spanish Wikipedia one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Chile_earthquake http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terremoto_de_Chile_de_2010
The Spanish Wikipedia one is a lot better organised and better focused. The en-Wikipedia one is more rambling and fails to focus on Chile and says a lot more about the tsunami warnings around the Pacific (which is old news now).
There are suggestions on the talk page to try and fix this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:2010_Chile_earthquake&dif...
But I still find it surprising. It is not as if there is a lack of sources in English (though there are more in Spanish), some of which I put on the talk page which got zero response.
Compare with the Haiti earthquake article (which also had large blocks of semi-protection, so that can't explain it):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake
Anyone have any idea why the two articles developed (and stalled) in such different ways, and had a very different pattern of editing volume and frequency? Is it purely down to the Chile earthquake getting less news coverage?
Carcharoth
Perhaps it is a combination of coverage (I see a lot less English coverage of Chile than of Haiti) due to the much smaller death toll and people using up their 'humanitarian' or 'interest' budget for the month on Haiti, and the relative lack of connection of Chile to US editors - there are a lot of Haitians or relations thereof in the US and apparently not so many Chileans.