German Wikipedia Passes One Million Article Mark 106
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."
Re:Citation Needed (Score:5, 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).
Re:Citation Needed (Score:1, Informative)
I'm bilingual and very strongly prefer en.wikipedia.org for most things. Longer and more detailed articles, more citations [citation needed]*, and more activity on talk pages. If it's an article about something related to Germany, the German wikipedia is usually better though.
*Anyone feel like making a script that counts the actual numbers?
Re:the English one is bad enough (Score:1, Informative)
Re:no, I want that (Score:3, 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.
Godwin's law... (Score:5, Informative)
Mike Godwin is actually and employee of the Wikimedia Foundation :) /dev/null".
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
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 [wikipedia.org]. 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 [wikimedia.org] 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".
by the way, quality... (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.