dgerard wrote:
Indeed. People speak of de:wp as more encyclopedia-like, better-written, etc. than en:wp, but I've asked a couple of German speakers about this and they tend to actually *use* en:wp as a reference ... because it seems that in practice, breadth counts more for usefulness than does looking like someone's ideal of an encyclopedia.
Indeed, indeed, indeed. And yet, en:wp has backslid quite a bit there, too.
A few years ago, in what I now think of as its heyday, Wikipedia was a useful one-stop-shopping place to look up *anything*. Today, it's still darn good, but you can only be sure of finding something if it's relatively mainstream. Deletionism (enabled, of course, by WP:RS) seems to have won out.