Wednesday, September 26, 2007

Itsy-bitsy labor

Sometimes a few fixups can make a WP article look a lot better. Today I found the Ok Tedi River on the wikify list. All right, I found the article, not the river itself, which is located in some God-forsaken corner of Papua New Guinea…as opposed to the non-God-forsaken corners.

The article looked bizarre with loads of blank space, because the tagger had left the wikify tag in a particularly silly location. You can see the mess here. I googled around and found a lot about this river, mostly because there was an environmental hoohah, tinged with Aussie-hate and business-bashing, in the late 1990s about a nearby copper mine. The hoohahing was so intense that it blotted out sources about the river itself, but I finally found a website that wasn’t focused obsessively on the mine.

I put that source in an external links section and found a reasonably neutral source for the mine-related stuff, which I put in a footnote. I added headings to create a table of contents, fixed a few punctuation and spelling booboos, and tacked on a little prose about the latest mine malarkey. The result looks considerably better, and I will say so myself.

Times like these are when I feel a little lazy. For minimal effort I got a much better looking article. Seems like it should be harder.

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