Comment by kjellsbells
6 months ago
This may be a "well, of course it's that way" observation to some, but: the article on X in wikipedia is typically quite different in one language than another. So you can get interesting insights by reading about X in different languages.
For example, the French article about David Hockney has a lovely Francophone twist in that the first few lines point out that he lived in Normandy for a few years, whereas Emglish Wikipedia buries the fact deep in the page. The page for VLC has a photo of the lead dev in the French page but no discussion of the plugin architecture. And so on. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to assume that the pages in some languages might be particularly strong if the topic plays a bigger role in the culture than in the English-speaking world.
It's also interesting to see what decisions editors have made about animals. In English, for example, the article for the African elephant[1] is just the animal's name.
In Italian, Spanish, and Tagalog it's the scientific name of the animal.
This makes sense in languages (like Spanish) where an animal may have a lot of different names depending on the country, region, or dialect. If you look at the article for Pig[2], you'll see at least fifteen names listed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_bush_elephant [2] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sus_scrofa_domestica