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.