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Comment by dividuum | Hacker News Reader

Odd borders are funny. Here's two other examples: The utter chaos in Baarle. They even have nested enclaves. So area of Netherlands surrounded by Belgium surrounded by Netherlands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/51.4402/4.9316

Between Germany and Switzerland, there's the German exclave Büsingen am Hochrhein. They have odd tax rules as Swiss VAT is applied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCsingen_am_Hochrhein

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=13/47.6941/8.6910

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My favorite is the border between India and Bangladesh:

https://www.google.com/maps/place/India/@26.2070568,89.16078...

You have to zoom in to fully appreciate it. It looks like a fractal.

The India-Bangladesh border is really fascinating. Looks like it was infinitely more complicated before 2015[0] Dahagram[1] appears to be the only major enclave that wasn't exchanged.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India%E2%80%93Bangladesh_encla...

[1] https://goo.gl/maps/Zgs1wsxqvo12

Heh, I didn't even realize they'd cleaned it up. That border first came to my attention in August 2015 and all those enclaves and meta-enclaves were still there. Apparently I caught them right before they disappeared. It's kind of a shame in a way. Makes the world a little less interesting.

You may find this a funny video covering the complex border situation, and the 2015 change. Especially the sadness over loosing such a fantastic map.

India/Bangladesh - The world's worst border by Jay Foreman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-aIzkvPwFo

It is/was mindboggling complicated but also keep in mind the events that produced it (the partition of India) also resulted in millions of deaths and 14 million people being displaced. It’s an incredibly sad story.

Yeah, well, there is that :-(

Another interesting one is Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France), fully contained within the eastern maritime borders of Canada. (edit: It is within Canadian exclusive economic zone which are international waters, not sovereign territory).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Saint-Pi...

The german entry for Büsingen is MUCH more detailed

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Büsingen_am_Hochrhein

This really frustrates me about Wikipedia because its like a totally parallel site and experience thats just right there and can even have conflicting information. Not helping the world as much as we think, but its so close to being able to.

Do you speak German? Would you mind translating parts?

I can give it a go, however my German skills aren't great.

There seems to be an English page too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Büsingen_am_Hochrhein

The point is that the English page is basically not even part of the same encyclopedia. It lacks the level of detail and might as well just be an inferior search result to some other website that you would have skipped

A lot of Wikipedia is like this. The entries in different languages are not equivalents of each other.

The Google translate is quite readable.

Just a tip for anyone passing by, [Deepl](https://www.deepl.com/translator) is miles ahead of Google Translate in terms of accurate/natural translations.

Can't we just all agree to speak English? No, I don't think that would be a good idea. Perhaps they could write a (albeit imperfect) tool to alert readers when another language has a much larger or more comprehensive article. I'm sure the Wikipedians have considered the fact that some information is better presented in a particular language. For example, an article about Shakespeare will be more precise in English than Chinese. However, I think it would be another kind of loss if the Shakespeare article was just in English and we forced people to use automated translators. Some might argue that this applies to all scholarship, not just Wikipedia.

The current issue isnt about being presented better in a different language, its just that these are basically different websites and different crowd sourced encyclopedias

I think your notification idea is good

It could look at number of sections, clusters of contributor activity, and then weigh that by character length with different weightings for each language

Did you just forget Esperanto?

How so?

As far as I remember (I can't check now) articles in foreign Wikipedias that have a "silver" or "gold" status are shown with a star in the list.

It might not be obvious to English speaking visitors as I suppose they don't pay much attention to the list, but visitors who speak multiple languages often switch between them to get the most information.

> As far as I remember (I can't check now) articles in foreign Wikipedias that have a "silver" or "gold" status are shown with a star in the list.

That's the case, at least when not on the mobile site; apparently the mobile site instead show the "best" version at the top of the list of versions, but I don't know how it is determined.

> Perhaps they could write a (albeit imperfect) tool to alert readers when another language has a much larger or more comprehensive article.

There's a template saying “this article could be improved with translation from $other-language.”

Sometimes the source documents only exist in one language, and speakers of that language are more likely to be interested in the topic.

I've occasionally wanted to translate some material from another Wikipedia, in a language I can read, into English. But the referencing in that Wikipedia is often quite bad, so I wouldn't be able to reference it properly in the English Wikipedia. Finding and interpreting good sources then starts to look like a major research project.

And often (I'm looking at you, Hebrew Wikipedia) - the rules for sourcing aren't the same in the first place.

Interesting - do you have an example?

So, one interesting tidbit from the German version:

Germany introduced daylight saving time ("Sommerzeit") in 1980, but Switzerland only in 1981. In 1980, Büsingen used CET (like Switzerland), not the daylight saving time (like the rest of Germany). So, while there was only one summer season of deviation from Germany, Büsingen (pop. 1443) is listed separately in some time zone databases, eg the Common Locale Data Repository.

As so often, the devil is in the details.

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