It was only recently that I discovered that each language’s version of Wikipedia is independently edited, rather than being a translated reflection of a canonical source material; and, therefore, that inevitably there will be “better” or “worse” versions of a page (i.e. more/less content, more/less fact-checking, etc.) depending on the language.
This gulf sometimes turns out to be so large, that it’s sometimes more informative to read a foreign-language Wikipedia article through machine-translation, rather than reading the one in your own language!
(I recall, in the recent HN discussion that linked to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musth, people were pointing out that the German-language article carried a lot more information than the English-language article. That specific discrepancy has probably been since fixed up care of HN readers themselves, but it was eye-opening, especially since the English-language version of the article was phrased in decisive terms like “scientists don’t know X” where the German article instead says “X is caused by Y” citing enough [German-language] studies to thoroughly prove its point.)
I wonder if DDG has just caught onto this trend, and is prioritizing the language of the article that has the most editorial activity. (It would actually be more work to do the opposite, now that I think about it—in raw PageRank terms, there’s always going to be a most-linked-to language-version of a Wikipedia article, and doing nothing means that that version simply floats to the top. Google et al must be doing extra work to group the “same” articles of different language-versions together, assigning them the PageRank of the highest-ranked one in the grouping, while rendering out the link+summary as that of the group-member corresponding to your own language.)
