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German Wikipedia Passes One Million Article Mark

Posted by timothy on from the but-now-they-use-euros dept.

saibot834 writes "The German Wikipedia, the second largest language edition behind the English Wikipedia, just reached its 1,000,000 article milestone. Combined with 3.1M English articles and 240 other language editions, this adds up to a total of 14 million Wikipedia articles. Interestingly, there is a request for deletion on the millionth article. German Wikipedia has been criticized for its rules on notability, which are stricter than on the English Wikipedia. Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia."

17 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Citation Needed by iammani · · Score: 5, Funny

    Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia

    Citation Needed

    1. Re:Citation Needed by Trepidity · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's not my anecdotal experience either, which admittedly isn't proper evidence, but at least somewhat more evidence than the bare assertion in the summary. I do a lot of translation of German Wikipedia articles to the English Wikipedia, and usually the articles aren't directly usable as-is under English-Wikipedia policy, mainly because of comparatively fewer citations (many articles on German historical figures or current politicians have no references at all).

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      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    2. Re:Citation Needed by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia

      Citation Needed

      "you know the Germans always make good stuff"

    3. Re:Citation Needed by nutshell42 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      In my experience that lack of "objective" checklist-quality (citations, NPOV, etc) in articles often helps.

      On many topics the English entry is almost unintelligible because it's just one (correctly sourced) quote after the other. God forbid someone trying to turn it into a whole instead of a disjointed mess because that might be interpreted as original research.

      Also many articles on scientific topics are used by scientists in the field for a virtual dick waving contest. So if you look up the article on the crackpointium effect (it's late and I don't have a good example handy. Sorry. I'll try to find one tomorrow) you'd expect something like

      The crackpointium effect is (short definition). In layman's terms that means (car analogy).

      • In depth paragraph A
      • B
      • C

      What you get is

      It is possible to describe the crackpointium effect because of the groundbreaking paper on the crackpointium effect by B Lender at the UoB. A team at Asshole U discovered the connection between it and some topic you don't give a fuck about. One of the most important discoveries was discovered by A. Dickwad. Another really, really important discovery was by B. Retard.

      Every single one of that sentences will be properly sourced (pimping their papers is the whole point after all) and any attempt to write a more useful article will be swiftly dealt with (because it would reduce the prominence of said papers) under the guise of some wiki policy or other.

      That said the German wiki has more than its own share of problems. The notability nazis, the same turf wars as the English wiki, picturephobia (I think due to even stricter fair use constraints but I'm not sure) and a bunch of others I've forgotten.

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      Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
  2. Stricter Rules? by RobinEggs · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So their rules are even stricter than the English version?

    Does this mean the German editors are nicer and less bureaucratic than the possessive assholes who consider English wikipedia their personal creation, or should we expect to see German wikipedia go down in flames sooner than later?

    1. Re:Stricter Rules? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

      Does this mean the German editors are nicer and less bureaucratic than the possessive assholes who consider English wikipedia their personal creation, or should we expect to see German wikipedia go down in flames sooner than later?

      Do you mean that the German Wikipedia has less WikiNazis?

  3. Milestones and barriers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    reached its 1,000,000 article milestone

    Thanks for saying it reached the milestone, rather than broke a barrier! Correct differentiations between milestones and barriers are rare, and I'd like you to know that it's appreciated!

  4. the English one is bad enough by r00t · · Score: 5, Insightful

    When I go to Wikipedia, I'm going there because I want some info that **I** happen to care about. I don't give a flying fuck if it meets some notability guideline. Wikipedia isn't printed on physical paper and sold as a 220-pound (100-kg) pile of books. Bits are cheap to store; there is no reason to be destroying people's hard work other than some asshole power trip. I'm pissed when I go to an article page seeing info and find it deleted; this happens often if you go directly to the obvious article name instead of just relying on Google and not questioning why there isn't an article for you to read.

    BTW, the other big problem we have is positive spin. Articles about any given subject are guarded by editors who have a vested interest in the subject. You're lucky if they only do 1-sided enforcement of no-original-research and citation-please rules to abuse people who tone down the glorification. It's easy to see and quite frustrating for the subjects where I am an expert and could be an editor. On the subjects where I am only a reader seeing to understand, it's frightening to know that these special-interest editors are warping my learning.

    You could pretty much say that the not-notable, no-original-research, and citation-needed excuses are Wikipedia's way to do a (Score:-1, Unpolitical) moderation. Not that people wouldn't delete stuff that makes them uncomfortable anyway, but those excuses sure encourage them by providing righteous justification.

    1. Re:the English one is bad enough by jonadab · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I agree with you about notability, for the most part. The original intention of the rule was to get rid of completely pointless articles written by college students about the guys across the hall, and that sort of nonsense. And that's all well and good. But sometimes it's applied too strictly. Breadth of coverage is Wikipedia's greatest strength. Excessively strict notability rules harm that.

      The "citation needed" rule has also been applied far too pervasively. Citations *are* needed, but a typical article should have ten or twenty of them, not fifty or a hundred, and there is absolutely no reason to have citations on basic information that anyone educated in the relevant field would be expected to know. When the article says "rap is a style of music that arose in the second half of the twentieth century", there is no need for a citation on that.

      However, I feel the opposite way about the original research rule. That one needs to be enforced more consistently. There are entire articles that are nothing more than the random musings of a couple of editors, with no meaningful citations at all. Occasionally such articles have even been featured on the front page (e.g., the Terraforming of Mars article). Such articles ought to be deleted so that a proper article on the topic can be created without bumping into namespace collisions.

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      Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
    2. Re:the English one is bad enough by stephanruby · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When the article says "rap is a style of music that arose in the second half of the twentieth century", there is no need for a citation on that.

      Since some people may not believe that this is a real example, let me cite it for you: --> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rap#cite_note-21

      No need to thank me. I'm the citation fairy. I aim to please. Please go on.

  5. Request for deletion by Arancaytar · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Interestingly, there is a request for deletion on the millionth article.

    And by interestingly, you mean unsurprisingly.

  6. Another 662k articles by Foobar+of+Borg · · Score: 5, Funny

    They could add another 662k articles if they would simple annex pl.wikipedia.org

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    Similar to the upcoming US election results
  7. no, I want that by r00t · · Score: 4, Insightful

    On the other hand, some rules are still needed to avoid wikipedia being filled with extremely detailed articles written by über-nerds and containing complete commentary on every 5minute slice of every Star-Trek episode.

    The chances are pretty slim that I'd ever want Star-Trek trivia, but it's not hurting anybody. That slim chance isn't zero. In case I ever do happen to need such info, where else could I rely on finding it?

    Furthermore, somebody clearly thought it was important. If one person thought this, then the chances are pretty decent that at least a few other people would agree.

    I am thus deprived of a just barely better wikipedia when you go delete the less important stuff. If I only wanted the important stuff, I could just buy a dead-tree encyclopedia. The unimportant stuff is actually important when you consider the whole.

    You're also needlessly pissing off contributers. Maybe that Star-Trek weirdo could also improve an article on something I care more about, but he decides that Wikipedia isn't worth his time because people needlessly destroy the stuff that he most likes to write about. So I miss out on his contributions even if I never would have noticed the Star-Trek stuff.

    1. Re:no, I want that by IntlHarvester · · Score: 2, Informative

      The chances are pretty slim that I'd ever want Star-Trek trivia, but it's not hurting anybody. That slim chance isn't zero. In case I ever do happen to need such info, where else could I rely on finding it?

      There are like 8 different Trekkie wikis with different editorial rules. IIRC Memory Alpha is the main one.

      Star Trek Wikipedia articles are a good example, because they used to be just of terrible quality, full "some fans believe..." crap and many of them written as if the show was real and not fiction. Since the other wikis have started up, most of the "Star Trek really happened" kooks moved on, and the Wikipedia articles are of much better quality.

      There's no real problem with the "trivial" popular culture stuff as long as it meets the standards for every other Wikipedia article. But the point of Wikipedia is not to be the repository for anything that any crazy retard wants to type on the Internet about their favorite TV show. That's what Geocities was for.

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      Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
  8. Godwin's law... by saibot834 · · Score: 4, Informative

    notability nazis

    Mike Godwin is actually and employee of the Wikimedia Foundation :)
    Seriously though, notability has been an issue people complain about since the beginning of Wikipedia. There is simply no way of pleasing everyone, no matter where you draw the line. You always have people complaining about "notability nazis" and "we are not /dev/null".

    picturephobia (I think due to even stricter fair use constraints but I'm not sure)

    I don't think that there is a "picturephobia" in the German Wikipedia. What you are probably referring to is English Wikipedia's fair use rules. We don't have that on the German Wikipedia for two reasons:
    a) Ideological reasons: "Fair use" images are proprietary. We want to build a free encyclopedia which everyone is allowed to copy, remix and redistribute. "Fair use" images are extremely limited in their use and cannot have a place in a free-as-in-freedom encyclopedia. I recommend reading the Veganism parable. Interestingly, these strict rules have resulted in a positive effect on release of free images. For example, Ubisoft wanted images of their video games in Wikipedia articles, so they licensed everyone to release screenshots of their games under a free license.
    b) Legal reasons. "Fair use" is mainly an US thing, and while Wikimedia servers are located in the US, German Wikipedia generally aims not to break German law. German copyright law is completely different from US law, we don't have a rule equivalent to "fair use".

  9. by the way, quality... by itedo · · Score: 2, Informative

    I'm not contributing to Wikipedia, I'm just an user, so I cannot judge their deletion policies.

    Though, I would like to criticize the statement

    "Quality though, is often considered to be higher on the German Wikipedia."

    Quality is not measurable directly. It's just a subjective thing. If you find quickly the right information for you - the quality is good. If you don't find it - you try somewhere else. In this case, your personal quality standards haven't been satisfied.

    This is where the deletion policies come into. Now if they tell "We take quality over quantity" - it's OK. But this isn't the case. Most articles are poorly translated from english to german; if you browse for some biographies (let's say Jimmy Page for example), there isn't even a terminology (missing the eye-catching information).
    Or even browsing the periodical table of the chemical elements - you get some information, but it isn't presented well. I'd rather like 750k high-quality written articles than >2M poor transcriptions from en.wikipedia.org or somewhere else from the www. That's where de.wikipedia.org is right now. They cannot meet they own quality standards, whatever that means. One day, they will understand...

    Even if they don't have that much contributors like en.wikipedia.org - they are doing a good job (ok, at least they are trying).

    As a student of physics, I prefer a thing called "book" or "paper" to be my primary source of solid knowledge (OK, not always but mostly). Considering Wikipedia in a scientific work, it is just fine if you need "quick and unimportant" information to verify something, because you cannot always attach validity to such a dynamic source.

  10. "Better quality" is a cheat! by SlothDead · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Yes, the German Wikipedia has a better quality on average, but that comes to no surprise, given that every not perfect arcticle and all articles about things the admins haven't heard of (video games, minor Star Wars characters etc.) are deleted almost instantly.
    And I guess that the English Wikipedia has as much, if not more, high quality articles than the German Wikipedia. The fact that the English Wikipedia allows medium quality articles to stay should not be considered a bad thing, I mean, who cares about the average quality? A medium quality article is still better than none at all (IMHO).

    I'm German, but I usually check the English Wikipedia first because I got tired of the procedure "Check German Wikipedia -> Be disappointed to find that the article has been deleted -> Read the English article instead"

    (Because of the "delete everything you don't find interesting" policy, some people have created "Wikibay", the encyclopedia where everything is considered relevant, as long as it's sourced etc. click here for German Wikibay)