Stan Shebs wrote:
Boris Lohnzweiger wrote:
Roger wrote:
The German WP doesn't keep articles just because the subject is notable. If an article is too short, it will get deleted unless someone expands it (IIRC a time limit of a few days is quite common).
This is not correct. There are a number of two or three line articles that have been on the German Wikipedia for at least a year and nobody is planning to delete them. According to German WP deletion rules shortness doesn't justify a deletion and deletion is only a means of last resort ("letztes Mittel") if other measures fail. If it weren't that way, would we have almost 300,000 articles then?
The conclusion that I take away from this thread is that yes, each wikipedia has its own culture and preferred practices, and it would be extraordinarily useful to have articles describing all that. Even just a translated summary of distinctive policy pages would be helpful to people who are not fluent in the other WP's language. For instance, if I were interested in whether the Russian WP accepts "fair use" images, an English WP article on the Russian WP would probably be a more reliable way to find out than by posting an English-language question on the Russian equivalent of village pump.
The perfect place for all this of course is on Meta :)