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
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.
I suspect the semiprotection has a lot to do with it. If our policies were more clear, we wouldn't have a debate every time a high profile event leads to a higher rate of editing. But we do, and a good portion (maybe even a majority) of the time the related article(s) end up protected in some fashion.
This is a problem; high profile articles have a great deal more attention from experienced Wikipedians than most, and also are a great draw for new editors. The no-protection pattern includes lots of quickly reverted vandalism, and a lot of useful new content added by new users that is then molded by veteran editors. The common pattern for protected articles is a steep drop-off in editing (even through semi-protection for autoconfirmed users), preventing the normal bump in article comprehensiveness and quality that should come when a subject hits the news.
I'm sure the other factors are important as well in comparing the two - proximity to large English editing populations, severity, news coverage, etc. I do wish we were more consistent with best practices when it comes to protection, though.
Nathan
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.
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