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, differently sourced, with several paragraphs on fishing rights and local place-name history that English never had, and missing the geology section you came for.

The sidebar looks like a language switcher. Every other website on the internet has trained you to read it that way — same page, different words. On Wikipedia it means something else. It is a list of independent encyclopedias that each happen to have an article about the same subject.

Almost every question people have about Wikipedia and languages dissolves once that one 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, its own administrators, its own notability rules, its own sourcing norms, its own deletion process, and its own article set. Articles are written locally by people working in that language. They are not derived from an English master copy, because there is no master copy.

Four consequences:

• The languages sidebar is a claim about concepts, not 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, but as a seed rather than a pipeline. 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 the moment a local editor works on it. Which is immediately.
• Image policy genuinely 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 no image in another, permanently.
• 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. None of that is a defect awaiting repair. It is what independent project means.

How big is each Wikipedia language edition?

All figures below are rounded hard and approximate as of 2026. Article counts change every hour; the live table is Wikimedia’s List of Wikipedias, which is the source to check rather than this page.

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 is ranking 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. What follows is the shape of each, not a claim about any specific article, because the specifics change weekly.

The contested-history row is the one worth sitting with. 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 land in different places. Reading both is how you find that out.

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 a threshold, three things follow: 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 different in kind 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 generally. They are a reason to know which edition you are standing in. A small edition is not worse. It is thinner, and thinness is a property you should be able to see.

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

The practical 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. A Japanese rail line, a Finnish municipal reform, 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 frequently the real prize: local newspapers, national archives, ministry publications, regional academic presses.
5. Treat disagreement as the finding. Where two editions differ on a date, a name, or a cause, you have located 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.

This 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 the reference. What follows is a design argument, and it is the reason WanderWiki is a swipe deck rather than a scroll.

A feed has a specific structure: items ranked by predicted engagement, no bottom, and a design objective where you leaving counts as 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 inverts three of those properties, almost by accident of the form:

The terminal action leaves the deck. The point of a card is to make you open the article. 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 that is chosen in a menu, not inferred from dwell time. Interest categories work the same way. A declared preference is worse at maximising engagement than a behavioural model, and better at the thing a reader wants, which is to be handed something interesting.

There is no accumulating state to defend. No streak, no level, no progress bar that decays. The deck is the same on day 200 as on day 1. You put it down when you are satisfied rather than when the supply of bait runs out — which was the whole argument in reading without a feed.

None of this makes a deck automatically virtuous. A swipe deck ranked on dwell time with a streak counter bolted on would be a feed wearing a costume. The form does not save you; it just makes the honest version easy to build and the dishonest version visibly gratuitous.

Where WanderWiki fits, and where it does not

WanderWiki is a discovery client, and it is worth being precise about what that excludes.

It runs on iPhone, iOS 18.2 and later. It carries 33 Wikipedia language editions — 33 of roughly 340, a real limitation and not a rounding error. Three modes: Random across the full encyclopedia, For You across 10 interest categories, and Today in History. Ad-free, no account, and individual articles save for offline reading in folders. It is paid software: a 3-day free trial, then $1.99/month, $8.99/year, or $24.99 once. That is the trade for having no ads and no engagement model to feed.

The part relevant to this post is the category mapping. Interest categories are mapped per language against that edition’s own category tree, so choosing German plus Science queries Wissenschaft, Physik, and Chemie rather than machine-translated English category names. That is the principle from the top of this page implemented in one place: the German Wikipedia’s category structure is the German Wikipedia’s, and pointing English category names at it returns the wrong articles or none. The data side is documented per-app on the transparency page.

What it does not do. It does not translate — if an article does not exist in the edition you selected, WanderWiki cannot conjure it, and that is the correct behaviour. There is no side-by-side view; switching editions switches the deck. It is iPhone-only.

And two genuine competitor advantages, because pretending otherwise would be silly. If you want the encyclopedia itself offline — the whole thing, in a place with no connection — Kiwix is the answer and nothing else is close; downloadable ZIM archives are a different engineering problem from caching the articles you saved. If you want to edit, watch pages, use talk pages, or reach every edition rather than 33, Wikipedia’s own official app is built for that and is free. WanderWiki sits in the narrow gap between them: a reading surface for the encyclopedia you are not currently searching for.

TL;DR

• Wikipedia language editions are written, not translated. Each is an independent project with its own editors, notability rules, sourcing norms, and image policy. There is no English master copy for others to render.
• The languages sidebar links concepts, not text. Those links live in Wikidata and assert only that two pages are about the same subject — 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 rather than 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 mine the references list — local sources are the usual payoff.
• Small editions are thinner, not worse — but thinness is 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.