Original Research

I'm doing some prep work in preparation of adding this next round of articles. Okay, more precisely, I'm working on this when my cats don't come upstairs and whine at me for attention. Already I've encountered enough problems to escalate my edit count numbers:

• Someone has come by and created articles for a town or two ahead of me. Always happy to discover that -- even happier when they put at least as much information into the article as I can.
  
• I've just been reminded that there are three towns in Ethiopia named "Addis Alem" -- only one of which is known outside of Ethiopia to any degree. So I made a series of edits to disentangle these three. At least I can disambiguate them on the basis that they are located in three different administrative Zones; next I'll have to do the same thing for two villages named "Edaga Hamus" in the Tigray Region.
  
• Then I discovered that some Somali nationalist decided to create several stubs for towns in the Ogaden with idiosyncratic spellings -- and at least one he claimed was part of Somalia. (I guess what they couldn't achieve by force 20 years ago, they will achieve with careful edits on Wikipedia.) Lots of moves and link repairs to untangle this problem.
  

And a note to those who can trace their heritage to Somalia: I do not have a conscious pro-Ethiopia bias here. I'm just writing articles, and trying to find verifiable information for them. If I haven't written an article that reveals wrongs in the Horn of Africa (and I have no specific group in mind here), it may be because I just haven't figured out how to get my head around the topic. Sometimes a subject leaves me depressed at the behavior of my fellow men.

Geoff

Technocrati tags: wikipedia

Labels: wikipedia, writing