Stirling Newberry wrote:
[...] there are signs of "poly-linguism", where the different languages are acting to support each other, where articles written in one language are being used as material or a basis for others. This will, again, serve to underline the advantages of wikipedia as a project. I know I have used German wikipedia articles at various times, and it might even be worth collecting some anecdotes about how wikipedia is forming a "research community" that is larger than any single language.
Amen - despite there being fewer articles, I've found plenty of German WP pages that are superior to their English counterparts, and someday I'd like to suck it:'s detailed data on the 8,000 Italian comunes into en:, whose Italian town info is currently spotty; still lots of red place-name links in English articles on Italian subjects.
Commons is also getting to be a considerable resource - locals can take more and better pictures of their own area than tourists usually, so en: articles are now getting a variety of illustration beyond what en: editors alone can muster.
Stan