OK. I've been working like... forever on this crappy article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pichilemu

What you think? Is it "in-depth" enough? What do you suggest?

How did Chile get an "O'Higgins Region"?

I suspect it's something to do with Bernardo O'Higgins (1778-1842), Chilean revolutionary general and El Supremo.

I honestly expected to see some kind of pokémon.

Is it "in-depth" enough? I was worried that I'd have to be moved into a Nursing Home before I could finish reading it!

Other than the (IMO excessive) length, there doesn't appear to be anything wrong with it - quite well-written, in fact. However, I should say that a tsunami doesn't provoke massive destruction. It might "produce" or "cause" massive destruction, or it might "leave massive destructiion in its wake," maybe, but not "provoke."

Part of the problem with that lies with the excessive use of passive voice or the lack of variety in the choice of verbs. Almost all the verbs in the first part of the article are declensions of the verb "to be." That produces (or causes) enough dulling of the senses to put most readers into a coma.


When departing from overuse of declensions of the verb "to be" the challenge is to find the best action verb from a dictionary list of thousands of delicious action verbs.

Here I might have said that a tsunami wreaked massive damage (if it's repairable) or destruction (if it's a total loss).

That's an interesting little example of the problem of trying to edit someone else's work. Someone says something that is wrong (I'd suspect that it is a second language English thing given the subject) and you have a choice, trying to nudge the writing into something that uses essentially the same structure, or stepping back a bit further and choosing a more appropriate construction by having a fresh run at it.

You see that quite a lot in Wikipedia, where the writing gets a bit mangled because people try and respect other people's efforts. How many times, for example, do people copyedit a whole article to try and standardise the style? It is often not the style that is the problem in an article, but the switching between multiple styles - hence articles that are essentially the work of one person are likely to be better than the evolved articles. Perhaps that's a study for Greg on Wikiversity?