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Wikipedia's traffic drop: more on languages and freshness
(en.wikipedia.org)
I believe most articles across different language Wikipedias are not translations but written independently from the existing ones.
Yes. Notably, the english version of wikipedia has a page of a list of bread.
The french version of wikipedia does not have that page. Further, many things are classified as bread in the english version of wikipedia, but as pastries in the french version.
I remember having an argument about this and I cited the english pages, and then they pulled up the french page and translated it for me. Lmao.
Yeah, the different versions don't have to be synchronised, and the standards for sources differ (outside of the big European languages, the standards are much lower and there's much more bullshit out there), and simply you can have one editor doing things the way they prefer on one wiki, an another editor with their preferences on the other one. Some of that can be a result of different local cultures or academic traditions (different terminology, different systems of classification, etc.).
Btw there's currently a project that's supposed to solve this, "Abstract Wikipedia", the idea being that you enter information that's language-independent and that can be converted into any individual language.
(It's really bad and won't work out.)
this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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