From: Toby Bartels on Friday, December 12, 2003 11:57
AM
You can continue to make subtler contrasts along these lines.
For example, when do you break a new article
[[History of the Statue of Liberty in France]]
because too much has been written on the French aspects
for the main article? Different languages will do this differently,
but in the limit of increasing depth of Wikipedia's coverage,
they will both do something like this eventually. And so on.
One may say that all languages are headed forthe same goal
but that we expect each language to follow a somewhat different path.
When we are all finished with all of the perfect encyclopedias,
then they may well all be perfect translations of each other.
But of course, we will never be finished!!! It's potential vs actual.
Much better said than I could. The only thing I'd say different is the
text of a single language can't be a perfect encyclopedia--only the work
that exists in all languages is the perfect encyclopedia.