The "brecha" is 18k and decreasing... but why is there a gap in the first place?

I've been struggling to explain to myself why there are less articles in the spanish wikipedia than the portuguese wikipedia (225.7k vs 253k on today's numbers).

I do respect quite a lot the communicative style that brazilians have.. and i've witnessed them adopt quite rapidly technologies that get people together like cell phones, and having even faster adoption of community-oriented technologies (like Orkut, blogging, and even flickering to some extent).

But the sheer mass of the spanish-speaking population seems to justify a larger article count in spanish. The role that portugal plays on the portuguese-speaking wikipedia seems quite big, but Spain should have an equivalent role in the spanish-speaking wikipedia.

And there's more: the geographic fragmentation of the spanish-speaking Americas should if anything drive more articles, so how come portuguese is still on top?

I will probably keep wondering that. But judging from the trends over the last couple of months, where the difference in article count seems to be decreasing by ~300 articles a day, probably some time in late june/early july we'll see a crossover.

I gotta confess though that I keep service both as much as I can, with small edits and new article aditions.. but a single individual is a drop in the ocean on these "constructions of cathedrals" as the open-source nerds put it.