A client's business had carried a stable, well-cited article on the German Wikipedia for six years. When they asked us to build the English version, the brief was simple: translate it. The reviewers on the English encyclopedia saw the case differently.
Wikipedia is not one project available in many languages. It is several hundred separate projects, each with its own volunteer community, its own accumulated precedent, and its own reading of what counts as significant independent coverage. A subject settled on one edition carries no standing on another. Nothing transfers automatically — not the text, not the verdict, not the years of quiet stability.
The next argument tried was to point the English reviewers to the German article itself, as proof the subject belonged. The reply came back with a note that is by now familiar: the existence of an article on another project establishes nothing here. Wikipedia does not treat Wikipedia as a source for itself, on one project or across five. An article's existence is not independent coverage. It is, at most, a pointer to whatever independent coverage the article was actually built on.
Wikipedia articles, or any source that mirrors or is based on Wikipedia, are not usable as sources, because Wikipedia is not a reliable source for itself.
The distinction cuts usefully the other way, too. Where the German article rested on genuine independent reporting — business-press profiles, regulatory notices, coverage that would satisfy an English reviewer on its own merits — that reporting could support the English draft directly, translated and cited in full. What could never do that work was a footnote pointing back at the German page.
So the English case had to be built from its sources upward, not translated down from a foreign conclusion. Some of the original coverage held up on its own. Some did not reach the bar English reviewers apply to a company of that size. The two articles now cite different fractions of the same decade of press, because they answer to different communities.
We treat each additional language as its own case now, not a rollout. A page elsewhere is a useful map of what coverage might exist. It is never itself the proof that any of it does.
