The authors compare English and Polish Wikipedia articles about well-known American and Polish people. Thus, four categories exist: Americans described in English, Americans described in Polish, Poles described in English, and Poles described in Polish. The authors find that differences clearly exist. For one thing, the English articles about Americans are longer. They present detailed comparisons.

Articles about Americans in the Polish version have the most positive content, and articles about Poles in the Polish version have the most balanced tone. Personal information, spouses, romances, and health-related matters appear most frequently in articles about Americans in the English version. Also, the English-written articles tend to have more references, which may suggest that the people writing the English articles have more experience with writing such entries. Wikipedia has an explicit neutral point of view (NPOV) policy. The paper asks whether this policy is really possible, or even desirable. It also questions the role of Wikipedia in languages other than English. For example, does a specific edition (version) promote local heroes and local values? The suggested model consists of an English edition containing information supplemented by local language editions.

The data is intriguing, if only because it may demonstrate what a culture thinks is important. There are significant implications for machine translation.