The English-language Wikipedia has a global community of editors, and as an editor, you'll regularly collaborate with people from many time zones. A typical contributor to the English-language Wikipedia may well be a native speaker in an Anglophone country—the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and others—but many editors are neither native speakers nor in one of those places. Getting to know people from all over the world is one of the benefits of getting involved in Wikipedia. Because editors are relatively anonymous, you'll often have no idea where your on-wiki friends are from or even their nationality. To get around cultural differences, remember the guidelines on interacting politely with others online, and don't rely too heavily on regional slang or Internet jargon, which not everyone will understand.
The diversity of contributors is also reflected in the global breadth of subjects on Wikipedia. Notability is not culture- or language-specific; geographical features, important individuals, and other notable regional topics should clearly be included in Wikipedia, no matter where they are or relate to in the world.
Several WikiProjects also focus on specific areas of the world. An example is WikiProject India, which focuses on writing articles about India, reviewing the existing articles about India, and supporting a community portal for editors interested in India-related topics. A list of WikiProjects that deal with geographical topics can be found at [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory/Geographical]].
Other WikiProjects focus on translating useful or interesting articles from other Wikipedias into English (other-language Wikipedias have similar projects that focus on translating articles into their local language). The place to coordinate translations in English is [[Wikipedia:Translation]]. Translation offers a double challenge: writing good English that is also good Wikipedia content.
Stylistic issues often appear in articles written in English by non-English speakers. Cleanup work on these articles helps make worthwhile material available. When evaluating an article according to the criteria laid out in Chapter 4, Understanding and Evaluating an Article, or in a deletion debate, take into account that the article may have been written by a non-native speaker with expertise in the topic.
When writing articles in English about topics from non-English speaking parts of the world, sources can be problematic. Finding source material in English can be much more difficult, for instance. Checking interwiki links to find the relevant article on other-language Wikipedias can be helpful for finding sources and more information.
Although citing non-English sources is not ideal, you can do this. You can use special templates to identify sources in other languages; for instance, placing the optional template {{it icon}} before a link to an Italian website alerts the reader that the source is in Italian (the language codes are the same standard ISO codes already mentioned). Citing a source that is not in a Wikipedia's native language is better than not citing a source at all. Try to locate English-language sources as well, so readers can verify your facts more easily. (If sources in different languages disagree, this can be useful information to note and include.)