User talk:Elian/comparison

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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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)

[edit] 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)