How do I fix this triangulation issue? I have this mesh of a ridge that I originally made by simply using the knife tool across a plane. This left me with a very disproportionate amount of vertices in the y-axis.

As I currently understand it, the shading artifacts that I've highlighted below are due to bad topology and ideally I want quads (or triangles) on the top and bottom planes as well.

Is there any tool in blender that can speed this up. I mean, I could walk through each vertex and add the edges by hand, that's not too much work but I was hoping that there's a tool that can actually do this, since what I want here is exactly one additional edge per vertex on the upper and lower plane.
You need to fill the faces with quads or triangles, or remove the smooth shading on the nogons. 

You can try (CtrlT) then (AltJ), to fill it with quads, as a quick fix.

A better method would be to repair your modeling.




Delete the vertices on the ends of your N-gons:

Select one of the edge loops at the bottom or top.

Extrude the vertices out(EX y or Z)

scale them to zero along the axis that you extruded them out(SX y or Z0).

Do the same for the bottom vertices.