On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:16 PM, Rob gamaliel8@gmail.com wrote:
There's also the lack of interesting controversies to spur editors' interest in the Chilean earthquake. With Haiti, you had Pat Robertson's stupid comments, the alleged attempted kidnapping of orphans, the invasion of Scientology, etc. Haiti's geographic proximity also increased relative coverage. The US English language media also largely ignores Latin America unless Hugo Chavez says something to hurt our feelings.
Of course these theories only apply to US-based editors. It would be an interesting exercise to geographically map out IP addresses and see where the interest and lack of interest is coming from.
Well, the en-wiki article is still rubbish. I had to write something today referring to this earthquake, and while the en-wiki article (and the sources to which it attributes the information it contains) was good enough for the limited information I needed, if I had wanted anything more detailed or indeed more informative and balanced, the Spanish Wikipedia article is still much, much better.
Versions for comparison if anyone is interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=2010_Chile_earthquake&oldid=35...
http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Terremoto_de_Chile_de_2010&old...
On en-wiki, the tsunami stuff takes up about half the article and is mostly irrelevant to what should be the main focus of the article. on es-wiki, the tsunami is tightly constrained to a short subsection, with more details in a sub-article. On en-wiki, there is little on the regional impacts within Chile, while on es-wiki, there is a section with eight subsection detailing what happened in different areas of Chile. The es-wiki article also has a lot more pictures.
Of course, there is a notice on the en-wiki article suggesting people update and rewrite using the es-wiki article, but that doesn't seem to be having any effect. I may eventually try and do something myself on this article, but it is rather disappointing the way the article stalled and just isn't going anywhere.
Carcharoth