[WikiEN-l] Chile earthquake article vs Haiti earthquake article

[Gwern Branwen]

On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 8:42 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at 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&diff=347843229&oldid=347824475
>
> 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.

-- 
gwern