As an example, the Catalan version of Wikipedia currently has +400.000 articles, being the 17th biggest.

To make clear what this means, you have to know that Catalan isn't even under the 100 most spoken languages worldwide (it has about 7 million speakers). So there is 1 article for every 17.5 people. Compared to the English version (4.4 million articles, 700 million speakers = 1 article every 159 people), or the Spanish one (1 million articles, 460 million speakers = 1 article every 460 people!), it is quite impressive.

So why would they want an own .cat domain? Because as a non-independent country / nationality, they are not allowed to have a two letter domain. Still, they wanted to be represented on the net so there was the PuntCAT foundation which did a huge effort in order to obtain the three letter .cat domain, but as it was sponsored, I imagine that they decided to restrict the usage of it to websites that have something to do with Catalan culture, or at least are written in Catalan.

I must say the Catalan culture and political movement is a pretty interesting topic itself, but I didn't want to make this post political, but rather interesting for "teh techies".