[ken]

This is very common for German Wikipedia.

Once I had the idea for a project (never completed) to analyze the differences in pictures accompanying articles across Wikipedia's languages. The results were about what you might expect. For their respective articles on "Food", you'll find:

- English: a photograph of vegetables, meat, bread, beans, and milk

- Japanese: a room full of tuna at a large fish market, white rice, and water

- Russian: potatoes, onions, spices

- Italian: a 17th century painting of some food

- Esperanto: the cover of an Esperanto book about food

- German: bar charts tracking food prices (and no pictures of any actual food)

It's interesting how Wikipedia makes it easy to jump between languages, yet each language's maintains its own identity and conventions. I've heard people propose to just start copying photographs from English Wikipedia into others (which tend to have far fewer pictures), and editors for those languages asking people to please stop.

[lainga]

The same applies to Wiktionaries - compared to English, the French Wiktionary is elegantly and spaciously structured, the German version telegraphic and dense on information.

[dmurray]

That's pretty interesting. The English approach (or the Japanese, or Russian) seems objectively better to me. I guess for something like "food" it can lead to a mild case of cultural imperialism, but having a picture of the thing is generally better than not having a picture, and AFAIK Wikipedia explicitly makes it easy to share media between the different language wikis.