zlacker

>>unquot+(OP)
People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those users that could not reasonably contribute, the percentage of contributors is much higher.

There are other factors at play at Wikipedia too. In my native language, Danish, Wikipedia is all but dead. Years ago, I tried contributing within my own field. I researched and spent hours adding relevant information to different topics, only to find out a few days after that all my contributions had been deleted by the administrators.

Here is the Danish site for one of the most beloved Danes: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup

Here is the English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup

It's just one example, but it is true for culture, history and many other areas. If you want to know anything on Danish matters, the English Wikipedia is usually a much better option than the Danish.

>>flexie+U2
I'd say that many times, that's true of Swedish topics too. I wonder how well that fits with eg Wikipedia in other languages where English may not be so fluent though, eg German?

>>retSav+u7
The German Wikipedia is large and sees a lot of activity. Articles about topics relating mostly to Germany, Austria or Switzerland are usually better than the English ones. Other articles are often somewhat biased towards a readership from those country, which is actually helpful if you live there.

Lower English language fluency in the general population, compared to the Netherlands or Scandinavia, supports this of course. But also the fact that German remains a scholarly language to this day (in the humanities but also in some branches of engineering).