German Wikipedia - Characteristics

Characteristics

The German Wikipedia is different from the English Wikipedia in a number of aspects.

• Compared to the English Wikipedia, different criteria of encyclopedic notability are expressed through the judgments of the editors for deciding if an article about a topic should be allowed. The criteria for notability are more specific, each field has its own specific guidelines.
• There are no fair use provisions. Images and other media that are accepted on the English Wikipedia as fair use may not be suitable for the German Wikipedia. However, the threshold of originality for works of applied art is set much higher, which often allows the use of company logos and similar icons, too.
• The use of scholarly sources, in preference over journalistic and other types of sources, is more strongly encouraged. The German Verifiability (Belege) guideline classifies scholarly sources as inherently more reliable than non-academic sources; the latter's use is – in theory at least – only permitted if there is a lack of published academic sources covering a topic.
• In September 2005, Erik Möller voiced concern that "long term page protection is used excessively on the German Wikipedia": On 14 September 2005, 253 pages were fully protected (only editable by admins) for more than two weeks (compared to 138 in the English Wikipedia). This was the highest number of such blocks of all Wikipedias. As of May 2008, the German Wikipedia still had the highest percentage of semi-protected articles - 0.281% - among the ten largest Wikipedias (articles not editable by unsubscribed or recently subscribed users), but with respect to the fraction of fully protected articles (0.0261%) it actually ranks fourth, behind the Japanese, Portuguese and English Wikipedias.
• Vandalism and other abuse is often handled in a less formal way. Vandals may get blocked on their first edit and without warning if their edit clearly shows lack of interest for actual encyclopaedic work. This is especially true if the added text includes unlawful statements, such as holocaust denial.
  Similarly, the Checkuser function is rarely used to determine multiple accounts, as "suspicious" accounts are often blocked on sight.
• Articles on indisputably notable subjects may be deleted if they are deemed too short. While the requirements for minimal articles (called stubs) are equivalent, the German and the English Wikipedia differ greatly in the way they are put into practice.
• On 28 December 2005 it was decided to eliminate the Category "stub" (and the corresponding template identifying articles as stubs) from the German Wikipedia.
• Users do not have to create an account in order to start a new article.
• Unlike the French, Polish, Dutch, Italian or many other Wikipedias, the German one does not contain large collections of bot-generated geographical stubs or similar articles.
• The German Wikipedia version did not have an Arbitration Committee until May 2007. However their power differ widely from the English version and they now play only a minor role in Wikipedia politics.
• Categories are singular and are not differentiated for gender. Categories are usually introduced only for a minimum of ten entries and are not always subdivided even for larger numbers of items, so that current categories often describe only one property (e.g., nationality). Other categories are subdivided, but differently than in the English Wikipedia. For example, "chemists" are subdivided by century, not by nationality. A university professor, on the other hand, will usually be categorized according to where he or she teaches.
• The equivalent to the English Wikipedia's featured articles and good articles are exzellente Artikel (excellent articles) and lesenswerte Artikel (good articles; literally: articles "worth reading").
• In 2005, there was a discussion and poll resulting in the decision to phase out the use of local image uploads and to exclusively use Wikimedia Commons for images and other media in the future. The attempt to implement this lasted for about a year and the German "Upload file" page displayed a large pointer to Commons in this time, but since December 2006, there is again a local image upload page without any pointer to Wikimedia Commons. This was prompted by the deletion of images on Commons that are acceptable according to German Wikipedia policies.
• Starting in December 2004, German Wikipedians pioneered Persondata ("Personendaten"), a special format for meta data about persons (name, birth date and place etc.), introduced in the English Wikipedia in December 2005. In the beginning, the main aim of this system was to aid the search features of the DVD edition of the German Wikipedia (see below). During its introduction in January 2005, Personendaten were added to some 30,000 biographical articles on the live Wikipedia, partly aided by a somewhat automatic tool.
• Like the Signpost in the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia also has its own internal newspaper, the Kurier. However, the Kurier is laid out on a single page and is not issued weekly but is continually updated by interested Wikipedians, with older articles being archived.
• In German Wikipedia is pronounced .