Introduction
To say that Wikipedia is important is like saying that the sky is made of air. It can be argued that this site is one of the top objects made by humanity in both scope and importance. Over six million articles on everything you could think of reside on the English Wikipedia, along with translations of this knowledge to hundreds of different languages, means that knowledge is more free than ever before.
However, that does not mean that it is foolproof or incomplete. In the last few days, I have been diving into the gaps that Wikipedia has in its knowledge-base and it is astounding.
Focus on the South
It would make sense that an encyclopedia written in English would primarily contain information on those of English subjects… English people, English countries, English culture, etc. What surprised me is the dearth of other cultures on the site. You would think that with an army of millions of contributors that at least one person has made an article on every town with more than one hundred thousand people in it, or musicians’ whose lives have touched many folx. This simply isn’t true.
Just yesterday, in fact, I completely revamped two articles of towns in Uruguay, Treinta y Tres and Cerro Chato . The former is the capital of its province (think of this like the capital large state, maybe Montpelier, VT) while the latter is the main cattle hub of a country that primarily exports cattle. These aren’t two villages in the middle of nowhere; these are major cities with people and stories to go along with them. Yet, there is nothing here to document these stories but a simple couple sentences saying that it is a town that exists.
It was easy enough to remedy this. I went to the Spanish Wikipedia where there was more information (Uruguay is a Spanish-speaking country). I translated this page and went to work transposing as much of the information I could find on the page into English and added it. Further, I could trace the cited sources to garner even more information about the towns in question - Cerro Chato was going to have an iron mine making hundreds of millions tons of ore before it was shut down by environmental activists that no one knew about!
Service
To me the craziest part of this was that none of this information was ever translated into English before I randomly drifted along to it. Prior to this edit, those in an English-speaking country unable to speak or understand Spanish had practically zero access to it. Yet one simple task was able to unlock some of these places. My work will be there for years to come, constantly improved on by others and teach others about the culture of these foreign lands.
It is easy to get started and is literally free. There’s nothing that is stopping anyone from doing this besides time and the cost of effort, both of which are easily over-exaggerated.
Over the next few weeks, I will be making a highlight of dilapidated sections of the English Wikipedia and comparing them to their respective counterparts in the Anglo-culture. It would make sense that the number of musicians in Spanish-speaking countries per capita should match that of Anglo-speaking countries per capita, We are going to examine that first hand here, along with other comparisons as well, along with additional ways to remedy these problems if they exist.