Leap Day 2008 is a big one in this city. For 24 hours, Hamilton is at centre stage around the world.

If you go online at all, you've wandered onto Wikipedia. It's one of the top 10 busiest sites, up there with YouTube, Google, Facebook.

It's the People's Encyclopedia, with information all provided by unpaid contributors like you and me.

It shouldn't work, but most of the time it seems to. Songs, solar systems, sea otters -- if you need to know more about something, Wikipedia is a good place to start.

Yes, tampering, vandalism and ineptitude do creep in, but a band of missionaries clean up messes fast.

There are 2,255,609 articles on Wikipedia. Within that number is a gold-standard category called Feature Articles, or FAs, which the site says "exemplify Wikipedia's very best work" and have to pass a panel of scrutineers.

There are only 1,918 FAs. And though it received no notice here or anywhere, last June 28, the entry on Hamilton was promoted to feature article status. It joined 44 cities around the world -- such as Boston, Jerusalem, Hong Kong.

Then there is the ultimate honour, to be picked for front page treatment at wikipedia.org, above the fold, with photo.

There's a different front-page feature every day. This month, for instance, topics have included hurricane Isis, Ronald Reagan, the Boeing 747, Peru, Irish phonology, the barn swallow, Rachel Carson, the M62 motorway and Knut, the captive-born polar bear at the Berlin Zoo.

But the best was saved for last, for Leap Day. As the clock struck midnight -- that's the Greenwich Mean Time clock we're talking about, so it was actually seven o'clock last night -- the English-speaking world's Wikipedia front page belonged to Hamilton, complete with a blue-sky image of the city from the Mountain Brow.

It's Hamilton's history, geography, demographics, economy, government, education, culture and pages and pages of Hamilton people, from ballerina Karen Kain to Aero restaurant owner Mary Wong to thoroughbred jockey Chris Rogers.

People everywhere will learn how to pronounce Hamilton. They will learn that we are called Hamiltonians, that we are the ninth-largest metro area in Canada, that we make most of the nation's steel, that we are starting to diversify, and much, much more. The reason Hamilton's entry made it to Featured Article status -- and for 24 hours, on front page -- is that a 39-year-old bakery shift-worker made that site his reason to live.

Yes, others have contributed too, but Rick Cordeiro has done the most by far. The son of Portuguese immigrants, he loves this city. "Call me Mr. Positive."

He would come home from Canada Bread at 2 a.m. and toil through the night on the Hamilton entry, a tower of reference material at his side. He made thousands of edits. I wrote about Cordeiro last April. Since then, his work achieved that Featured Article status. And then he went out with a new digital camera and began to shoot this city.

He took some 400 photos. You'll see postcard-quality images of streets, waterfalls, landmark buildings. And you'll see that in Hamilton it is never grey.

"I only went out on sunny days," Cordeiro says. "I didn't want to paint Hamilton with a dirty brush."

Reader and devoted Wikipedian Lisa Di Valentino alerted me to Hamilton hitting front page. I called Cordeiro, who hadn't yet heard.

"I've got two words," he said. "Mission accomplished."

But he told me there is trouble on a couple of fronts.

Lately, he's been subject to lots of nastiness on his Wikipedia user page. He's not sure why. "Maybe someone doesn't like the city."

It's gotten so bad that he's stepping away for awhile. But there's a darker cloud yet. Come May, he expects to be laid off at the bakery. His job has been to stack trays of bread, "but they're getting a robot to do that work ...

"I'm thinking of heading to Alberta. I don't want to, but maybe I have to go where the jobs are."

Wikipedia has not yet granted Featured Article status to Edmonton or Calgary. Hamilton's hardworking son would probably get them there fast. 'Tain't right.

StreetBeat appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

pwilson@thespec.com

905-526-3391