Articles that every Wikipedia should have... True Jesus Church?

[pne]

I was welcomed to the Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia after I created an account there. When I noticed that today, I had a look at the user talk page of the user who welcomed me, and found, among other things, a couple of requests to translate articles from other languages into Pennsylvania Dutch.

Two of these were True Jesus Church and Świętochłowice.

While it's kind of the user to have translated the first article, I wonder whether those two articles, in particular, are ones that "need" to be in any Wikipedia.

I mean, sure, any information is better than nothing... but having an article on a town in Poland with 55,500 inhabitants (that I've never heard of and that the average English speaker probably couldn't pronounce) before an article on, say, "London" or "Nature" seems... odd. (There isn't one in pdc: yet.)

Similarly with the True Jesus Church; the list of Interwiki links on that article is pretty impressive—they even managed to get articles in languages such as Anglo-Saxon, Gothic, Jèrriais (Jersey Norman French), and Tok Pisin. (Though I wonder how many of the "translations" are like this one, ostensibly in Cherokee.)

Hmm, looking around, there are also a few that are just one sentence and others where all or parts were apparently machine-translated.

Comments

[brad.livejournal.com]

Heh, it's fun reading Pennsylvania Dutch.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I know! I find it amusing, too. It sounds kind of cute to me.

[marikochan.livejournal.com]

Interesting -- I'd never seen Pennsylvania Dutch written before. It looks very like German. How did you learn it?

[pne.livejournal.com]

I didn't learn it -- I just signed up for an account there because I like to have accounts on lots of Wikipedias :)

And I would say that it's a variety of German; as I understand it, it's the language spoken by descendants of people who emigrated to the States and Canada from Germany, primarily from the Palatinate (e.g. the area around Mannheim), so their speech would be more similar to the dialect spoken there today than to standard German.

I can understand a fair bit due to the relationship of the languages (and due to the fact that I know English, as PD appears to use a greater or lesser number of English loanwords, depending on the speaker, e.g. "tschuuse" from "choose" as opposed to a cognate to the German "aussuchen, auswählen"), though not everything. I wouldn't try to speak it.