The same Wikipedia article is a different article in another language

Open the English article about a Finnish lake and click Suomi in the languages sidebar. You will probably not get that article in Finnish. You will get a different article, longer and differently sourced, with several paragraphs on fishing rights and local place-name history that English never had, and without the geology section you came for.

The sidebar looks like a language switcher, and every other website has trained you to read it that way: same page, different words. On Wikipedia it is a list of independent encyclopedias that each happen to have an article about the same subject.

Most questions people have about Wikipedia and languages are answered once that misreading is cleared up, so start there.

Are Wikipedia articles translated into other languages?

Usually not. Each language Wikipedia is a separate project with its own editors, administrators, notability rules, sourcing norms, deletion process, and article set. Articles are written locally by people working in that language. There is no English master copy for them to be derived from.

That has four consequences:

• The languages sidebar links concepts, and says nothing about the text. Since 2013 those links have lived centrally in Wikidata: one Wikidata item groups the pages that are about the same subject across editions. The item says nothing about their length, structure, sourcing, or agreement.
• Translation exists, as a seed for new articles. MediaWiki’s Content Translation tool lets an editor start a new article from an existing one in another language, and has produced a large cumulative number of articles since 2015 (the running total is on the tool’s own dashboards). It is still small next to the tens of millions of articles across all editions, and a translated article stops being a translation as soon as a local editor works on it, which usually happens right away.
• Image policy differs. English Wikipedia permits a narrow class of non-free images under its non-free content policy. Several large editions, German among them, accept none at all. The same subject can have a photograph in one language and, permanently, no image in another.
• So do inclusion thresholds. English works from a general notability guideline built on significant coverage in independent reliable sources. German has its own Relevanzkriterien, stricter in several areas and the subject of a long-running internal argument about exactly that. Other editions are looser than either. A subject can be notable in one encyclopedia and deleted from the next.

So two editions can disagree about facts, framing, article length, and whether the subject deserves an article at all. That is what independent projects do, and none of it is a defect waiting for repair.

How big is each Wikipedia language edition?

All figures below are heavily rounded and approximate as of 2026. Article counts change every hour; check the live table on Wikimedia’s List of Wikipedias for current numbers.

Two things about that column of numbers.

First, “article” has a precise and unglamorous definition: a page in the main namespace, not a redirect, containing at least one internal link. A one-sentence stub about a river in the Philippines counts exactly as much as a book-length featured article on quantum chromodynamics. Ranking editions by article count ranks them by a measure that ignores everything you care about.

Second, edition size does not track speaker population. Dutch has more articles than Arabic; Hindi has a fraction of Finnish. Size tracks how many people chose to write an encyclopedia in that language over twenty years, plus whatever bots ran there.

Why do two editions disagree about the same topic?

The divergences fall into recognisable kinds. The table describes each kind in general terms, since the specifics of any one article change weekly.

The contested-history row deserves the most thought. When editions disagree about a border, a war, a name, or a leader, it is rarely because one is careless. Each edition’s editors read a different body of published sources, in a different language, from a different set of institutions, and each edition’s neutrality policy is applied by people inside that source environment. Two well-run editions working honestly from different literatures can land in different places, and you only find that out by reading both.

What happens when an edition has very few active editors?

Editing capacity is not spread evenly. English Wikipedia’s active-editor count runs in the tens of thousands (live figures on Wikimedia Statistics); most editions are in the hundreds or below, and many have single-digit regulars. Below some point, bot-created stubs dominate the count, errors and vandalism survive longer because fewer eyes pass over each page, and a very small group can shape a large share of the edition.

The Wikimedia Foundation commissioned and published a disinformation assessment of the Croatian Wikipedia in 2021 after a small group of administrators had steered content there for years. The Scots Wikipedia case in 2020 was a different kind of problem and just as instructive: a single prolific editor had written tens of thousands of articles in a version of Scots that fluent speakers did not recognise, and it went unchallenged for years because almost nobody was reading.

Both were documented and addressed openly, and neither is a reason to distrust Wikipedia in general. They are a reason to know which edition you are reading. A small edition is thinner, which does not make it worse, but you should be able to see how thin it is.

How do you actually read a topic in a second language?

The technique is short:

1. Start from the article you have and open the languages sidebar. Every listed edition is a separately written article about the same concept.
2. Prefer the edition closest to the subject. For a Japanese rail line, a Finnish municipal reform, or a Brazilian composer, the home edition almost always has more, and has it from sources nobody translated.
3. Let the browser translate the page. Safari and Chrome both do full-page translation. You do not need to read the language to find out whether the article is four paragraphs or four screens.
4. Read the references section even when the prose is machine-translated. The source list is often the most useful part: local newspapers, national archives, ministry publications, regional academic presses.
5. Note where the editions disagree. Where two editions differ on a date, a name, or a cause, you have found a place where the published literatures differ.
6. Do not quote the machine translation. It is a reading aid; if a specific claim matters, go to the cited source.

It is unglamorous and it works. It is also the fastest way to notice that the English Wikipedia you have been treating as the encyclopedia is one among roughly 340.

Why a deck holds up better than a feed

Everything above is reference. The rest is a design argument, and it is the reason WanderWiki is a swipe deck and not a scroll.

A feed ranks items by predicted engagement, has no bottom, and treats you leaving as a failure. Every mechanism follows from that. The ranking input is your behaviour, because behaviour predicts engagement better than anything you would tell it. The list is infinite, because a bottom is an exit. Continuation gets rewarded, because a reason to return tomorrow is worth more than a good session today. I have written about the streak half of that machinery elsewhere, and about what this studio refuses to build here.

A card deck of encyclopedia articles reverses three of those properties, almost by accident of the form.

The best outcome is that you leave the deck. A card exists to make you open the article, and opening the article means you stop swiping and start reading something long. A feed whose best outcome is “user departs into a long article on the Antikythera mechanism” is a bad feed and a good deck.

The ranking input can be a setting. In a multilingual reading app the strongest personalisation lever is the language edition, and you choose it in a menu; nothing infers it from dwell time. Interest categories start the same way: you pick them, and you can tell the deck to show less of something. A declared preference is worse at maximising engagement than a behavioural model, and better at what a reader wants, which is to be handed something interesting.

The deck carries no state to defend. Swiping does not level you up, and the deck is no better on day 200 than on day 1. You put it down when you are satisfied, before any supply of bait runs out, which was the whole argument in reading without a feed. WanderWiki does keep one count outside the deck, the days in a row you have read something, shown on its Profile tab, plus optional notifications: one naming the day’s featured article and one warning that a streak is about to break. Neither changes what the deck shows you.

A deck is not automatically virtuous. A swipe deck ranked on dwell time with a streak counter bolted on would be a feed in a costume. The form makes the honest version easy to build and the dishonest version obviously unnecessary, and that is all it does.

Where WanderWiki fits, and where it does not

WanderWiki is a discovery client, and that rules some things out.

It runs on iPhone and iPad, iOS 18.2 and later. It carries 32 Wikipedia language editions out of roughly 340, which is a real limitation. There are four ways in: Random across the full encyclopedia, Browse and For You across 16 interest topics, and Today in History. How random that Random draw really is, and how to make one land on a featured article, is covered in a guide to finding interesting Wikipedia articles. The app has no ads and no account, and the articles you save stay on the device, in folders. It is free for 20 articles a day; Premium, which adds For You, Today in History, and unlimited swiping, is $1.99/month, $8.99/year, or $24.99 once. Paying is what replaces ads and an engagement model.

The part relevant to this post is what changes when you switch editions. Random, Browse, and search all read from the edition you pick, so a German deck is made of the German Wikipedia’s own articles, written by its own editors, and not English ones run through a translator. Today in History uses the edition’s own On This Day feed in 19 of the 32 editions and the English feed in the rest. Where For You isn’t available for an edition yet, the app shows Random and says so. That is the point from the top of this page applied in one place: each edition’s articles belong to that edition. The data side is documented per app on the transparency page.

There are things it does not do. It does not translate: if an article does not exist in the edition you selected, WanderWiki cannot produce it, and that is the correct behaviour. There is no side-by-side view; switching editions switches the deck. And there is no Mac or web version.

Two competitors do some things better. If you want the whole encyclopedia offline, in a place with no connection, Kiwix is the answer and nothing else is close; downloadable ZIM archives are a different engineering problem from downloading the articles you save. If you want to edit, watch pages, use talk pages, or reach every edition and not just 32, Wikipedia’s own official app does that and is free. WanderWiki sits in the narrow gap between them, as a way to read the parts of the encyclopedia you were not searching for.

TL;DR

• Wikipedia language editions are written locally, not translated. Each is an independent project with its own editors, notability rules, sourcing norms, and image policy. No English master copy exists for the others to render.
• The languages sidebar links concepts. Those links live in Wikidata and assert only that two pages are about the same subject. They say nothing about length, framing, or agreement.
• Article counts are a bad size ranking. English is around 7 million and Cebuano near 6 million, but the second is almost entirely bot-generated stubs. Check the live List of Wikipedias before trusting any number on a blog, including this one.
• Reading a topic in a second edition is a real research technique. Open the edition closest to the subject, let the browser translate, and go through the references list, where local sources usually turn up.
• Small editions are thinner, which makes them fragile. The published Croatian and Scots cases show what happens when very few people are watching.
• A deck is defensible where a feed is not. Its best outcome is you leaving to read something long, its ranking input can be a declared setting, and it has no accumulating state to defend.