Wikipedia and Tanzanian Geography

By: Ragnvald Larsen on: Sat 18 of Aug., 2007 11:22 CEST (1095 Reads)

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The body of literature on Tanzania in Wikipedia is growing. In this article I will list some of the most relevant articles for our GIS community. Should you find errors or shortcomings in the articles then maybe some of the TZGISUG readers could find it appropriate to do the updates?

Introduction

This article is meant as an overview of some of the Tanzania related articles in Wikipedia. For those of you who do not know what Wikipedia is the short version is that Wikipedia is a publicly owned and maintained encyclopedia. Anybody may add or change articles on their website:

www.wikipedia.org

Writing this article I hope that more Tanzanian residents (and other) will be aware of the unique possibilities to clarify issues in the encyclopedia.

Tanzania

This is the overarching article covering history, demography, media, culture, regions politics and more. There is only a small paragraph on the environment:

Tanzania has considerable land area of wildlife habitat, including much of the Serengeti plain, where Blue Wildebeest and other bovids participate in a large scale annual migration. Up to 250,000 Blue Wildebeest perish each year in the long and arduous movement to find forage in the dry season. Tanzania has developed a Biodiversity Action Plan to address species conservation.

Anybody but me thinking this one is in need of attention?

Geography of Tanzania

This is another thin article. Geology is not mentioned. The greatest rivers and watersheds are not mentioned either.

List of protected areas in Tanzania

The protected areas should be fairly common knowledge among the members of the TZGISUG list. Not completely ok this one either. Anybody heard of Mt Meru National Park? Didn't think so... I'm sure there are other details to deal with as well.

Districts and regions

The districts and regions of Tanzania are kept in separate lists:

Regions Seems ok.
Districts Is everything correct here?
The respective districts points to individual pages containing lists of wards and other related information In theory one could also add information on ward level. (Arumeru district page)