German Wikipedia Passes One Million Article Mark

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."

Stricter Rules?

[RobinEggs]

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?

Milestones and barriers

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Citation Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Many of the lesser known technical articles are barely a good translation of the English version. I mostly prefer en.wikipedia even though I'm German.

Re:Citation Needed

[nutshell42]

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.

Re:the English one is bad enough

[stephanruby]

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 [wikipedia.org]

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