User talk:Elian/comparison

Thanks for posting this; it's an interesting comparison! — Matt Crypto 06:50, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Yes, thanks for posting this. As an admin at en-Wikipedia I'm always interested to hear about what's going on over at de-Wikipedia. This comparison was a great read, thanks. Babajobu 00:27, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

I find the comparison very interesting as well. I wish we could have more of this. I haven't really read much of the German Wikipedia before, but now I got curious. Overall I think their articles look cleaner. Not so many tags and fuss spread around. For instance, I can't find a single Spoiler tag anywhere in German film or book articles. (It's like they have understood that they're an encyclopedia and not an old usenet group...) They seem to use sprotection more frequently than us, I wonder why and if it's something that works well for them or is debated. They don't put that distracting sprotect template on top of articles, though, but on talk (I wish we could as well). It looks like they wikilink a bit less than us, the exeption being that they do seem to like wiki-linking single years (just based on reading a few of their FA's), which I find a bit strange from a cleaness side. But it's all a matter of taste, I guess.

On their main page I notise that they welcome good (emphesis mine) editors. We are just saying that everyone can edit. Us not expressing interest in if editors are good is the more open and including thing to do, but it could also be that emphesising the need for quality contributions could give us more of exactly that, at least proportionally. Just a thought, and I wonder if the Germans choice of the "good" word came after a debate or if it's just the obvious thing for them to ask for. You'd think that we are the ones who could be picky about who we welcome, and not the other way around. That the degree of editor-pickyness one can make is proportional to the number of speakers of a language. Shanes 02:47, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

The choice came after a small discussion by three editors in a nice cafe in Kassel (see elian's thoughts about social structure and geographic advantage), and was changed on the main page. afterwards there was a middle-scale debate in de-wikipedia, but as far as i can remember there was no serious challenge in favour of "everybody" instead of "good editors". -- southgeist 01:21, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

Nice!

Thanks for the great article. It would be interesting to see the same comparison for JA , FR and other big wikipedias. I might have to dust off my german and start reading DE some.-Ravedave 04:38, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Good Comparison

I have almost the same comments reading your comparison which is really good. If we summarize this the way I see it, en-wikipedia wants to become the biggest encyclopaedia as de-wikipedia wants to become the best and best-written encyclopaedia. And this is why in the en-wikipedia some poor written articles are lost in "mainspace" thus leaving the impression that en-wikipedia is poorly written though it is not. Secondly, there are so many users in en-WP that we lose trace of them and once the get few edits, they create non-sense pages (I'm not generalizing but showing a how a small number of wikipedians act).

I was wondering if de-wikipedia uses inline citations like en-wikipedia does???? Lincher 13:23, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

They have the technical ability to, and occasionally they do, but mostly source citation at de-wiki is only in the form of bibliography lists at the end of the article, without inline cites indicating exactly what came from where. There doesn't seem to me to be any move toward using them either, not even in featured articles. (I've written a rant about this at Wikipedia talk:En.Wiki is not De.Wiki; it's the reason I've left de-wiki.) —Angr 06:21, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

in my opinion ...

I came across this page while reading Kim Bruning's "reading list", and I must say, I find that you have some very good things to say. However, I also have some very pointed criticisms of de:wiki. The absence of a lot of tags and warnings on de:wiki may be an indication of higher quality, or it may be (as I have found) an indication of a greater tolerance. I have personally found that de:wiki has a much higher tolerance for POV than en:wiki. We tag and make a big fuss over it ... they live let POV live. (Take, for example, the article de:Mainzer Dom and the (incomplete) translation of it.)

I'd like to hear your opinion on that. Please feel free to prove me wrong (I enjoy being proven wrong). But I think that fact could have a lot to do with de:wiki's position. - CheNuevara 23:40, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Absolutely not true! The POV wars are, due to internationality, a much larger problem on the en:wp. The endless discussions about views are much more common here. Also I found the standards for new articles on en:wp to be much too low. I mean look at all the Pokemon articles!--Tresckow 04:00, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

And look at all the articles Tresckow has started! --Kronecker 07:35, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

...I am a User in the Spanish wikipedia. I mainly translate from en: and rarely from de: In my opinión, the strength of en: is the number of articles. You find anything there!! If it is not there it will (probably) not be anywhere else. The strength of the de: wikipedia is the sources, the references. Nearly all the articles have got sources and, which is more important, very few are short. I will add one thing which is a circumstance not very known to everybody: German is spoken by approximately 100 million native speakers in the European Union, so it is the first mother-tongue in the EU, not English (only 70 million citizens of the EU have English as their mother-tongue), and German is mainly sponken in countries where nearly everybody has got internet at home and long evening hours of winter to write. Of course there are a lot more of English-speaking people all around the world -even more people speak Chinese or Hindi but, have they all got internet? I don't think so. That's my opinion.--Joanenglish (talk) 16:04, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Sources? References? At German Wikipedia? Are you kidding? Even the featured articles there often don't cite their sources. Ultimately there are two factors that conspire to make the proportion of featured articles much higher at de than at en: (1) de is extremely deletionist: the notability criteria are much stricter than there here, and even articles on unquestionably notable and encyclopedic topics are routinely deleted if they're too short; (2) the standards for promotion to FA are much lower, since there's no expectation or desire that articles cite their sources. Our proportion of featured articles would be much higher too if we deleted everything currently ranked as "Stub" class and if we promoted all Good Articles and A-class articles to Featured. And yet, in absolute numbers, de doesn't have that many featured articles. They recently started allowing Good Articles to be Today's Featured Article on the main page because they were running out of Featured Articles that had never been there. —Angr 17:17, 28 May 2008 (UTC)