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Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

The English language Wikipedia is great. Some other language have big problems with certain admins that prevent new articles or any additions at all (e.g. German language). WikiMedia should do something and "fix" those administrative issues.

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This needs to be a bit more nuanced. I do see new articles popping up in the German Wikipedia.

It's a well-known problem in the German Wikipedia that has been regularly making it into the local newspapers for several years now:

http://www.taz.de/!5087443/

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/WikiCon-Konfliktfeld-...

I'm not sure whether there's English articles on the (apparently rather German-centric) problem. (For one, it's easy to find the German ones, because of course Germans have a distinct word for it: Löschnazi-Debatte.)

(Edit: Sorry, accidentally misclicked and downvoted you.)

> nuanced

Really? No. It's a well known wide spread systematic problem. The root cause should be fixed by the international Wikimedia Foundation.

Read about the issues on English Wikipedia:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions

German Wikipedia is not associated with Wikimedia, and Wikimedia has no control over them.

I am a Wikipedian and have been since 2010. Because I read German, I occasionally refer to and edit German Wikipedia. I'm not so sure that German Wikipedia is really that much worse than English Wikipedia in the topics I follow most closely (psychology and linguistics), and I might rather say that English Wikipedia should be less hasty about adding new articles on every pop-culture topic for which few reliable sources exist.

German Wikipedia looses a lot of valuable content, on some days more than new content is added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Deletions

The notability guidelines are very off in the German Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Wikipedia#Characteristi...

English Wikipedia is really good. Though sometimes even there I wished some articles were on Wikipedia rather than some obscure Wikia-subwiki with tons of advertisement. It's not like HDD space costs much money these days. And all these article have sources anyway. Wikipedia had this nice "triva" sections that I love on IMDB.com up to 2006 (or so), sad some decided to delete them as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Triv...

  This guideline does not suggest removing trivia sections, 
  or moving them to the talk page. If information is 
  otherwise suitable, it is better that it be poorly 
  presented than not presented at all.

It's not just non-English language Wikipedias that have have admin issues.

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