[Foundation-l] Cross-wiki articles

[Ting Chen]

effe iets anders wrote:
> I think that if the public does /not/ differentiate, that is actually
> quite a compliment. That actually shows that the quality is better,
> because it corrects for the lower quantity and the assumptions that
> English must be better because more people. For example in the
> Netherlands, a lot of people still say " well, yes, I use Wikipedia,
> but of course only the English, which is much better and extensive" .
> This while the Dutch version is absolutely not small (>500k articles)
> and imho not with a very low quality. So if people don't
> differentiate, that already tells something about the German version
> :)
>   
sorrowfully I don't know dutch and nl-wp, so I cannot say about why the 
dutch people would prefer en-wp. Maybe one of the reason is also because 
most dutch people are really multilinguals.

There are a few reasons why some german would go for en-wp but not 
de-wp. The first reason is history. Historically en-wp had more content 
and was better. de-wp had catch up a lot in the last two years. But if 
you had mostly used en-wp earlier, you would probably remain there and 
think it is still so. This is not so, I quite sure know that. I 
translate a lot of articles to zh-wp. Three years ago most of the 
translations come from en-wp. Now I even think I use more de-wp as basis 
for the translation than the en-wp.

I think the threshold of notability (where in de-wp is far more higher 
than in en-wp). Say, I am interested in Simpsons, I would definitively 
go to en-wp which have far more content about topic as in de-wp. Not all 
peole search internet for information because they want to do research 
work. Most of people do it because they are simply interested in 
something, a place, a person or a movie, a game. In these cases a 
language version like the en-wp with a lower notability threshold is 
more useful.

-- 
Ting

Ting's Blog: http://wingphilopp.blogspot.com/