German Wikipedia

The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
Founded on 16 March 2001, it is the second-oldest Wikipedia edition. It has articles, making it the -largest edition of Wikipedia by number of articles as of 2024, behind the English Wikipedia and the mostly bot-generated Cebuano Wikipedia. It has the second-largest number of edits and of active users behind the English Wikipedia. On 7 November 2011, the German Wikipedia became the second edition of Wikipedia, after the English edition, to exceed 100 million page edits.

History

Early history

The German edition of Wikipedia was the first non-English Wikipedia subdomain, and was originally named. Its creation was announced by Jimmy Wales on 16 March 2001. One of the earliest snapshots of the home page, dated 21 March 2001, can be seen at the Wayback Machine site. Aside from the home page, creation of articles in the German Wikipedia started as early as April 2001, apparently with translations of Nupedia articles. After the Catalan Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia was the second non-English edition to contain articles. The earliest article still available on Wikipedia's site is apparently Polymerase-Kettenreaktion, dated May 2001.
Andrew Lih wrote that the hacker culture in Germany and the Eingetragener Verein concept solidified the German Wikipedia's culture. The geography of Europe facilitated face-to-face meetups among German Wikipedians.

Growth, coverage and popularity

On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the second edition, after the English-language Wikipedia, to do so. The millionth article was Ernie Wasson. In March 2014, 88% of the edition's articles had more than 512 bytes, 57% had more than 2 kilobytes, and the average article size was 4,298 bytes. As of August 2025, the German Wikipedia has nearly 990,000 biographies and 360,000 disambiguation pages.
As of January 2025, the German Wikipedia is the fourth most viewed language edition of Wikipedia, after the English, Japanese and Russian Wikipedias.
The German edition tends to be selective in its coverage, often rejecting small stubs, articles about individual fictional characters and similar materials. Instead, there is usually one article about all the characters from a specific fictional setting, usually only when the setting is considered important enough. A dedicated article about a single fictional entity generally exists only if the character in question has a very significant impact on popular culture. Andrew Lih wrote that German Wikipedia users believe that "having no article at all is better than a very bad article." Therefore, growth on the German Wikipedia leveled before it did for the English Wikipedia, with accelerating growth in article count shifting to constant growth in mid-2006. The number of users signing up for accounts began to steadily decline in 2007 through 2008.
The number of volunteer authors began to stagnate in 2007 and has decreased since then. In Germany, the number of regularly active authors fell by more than a third from the peak of 9,254 at the beginning of 2008 to 5,862 at the end of 2015.
The January 2005 Google Zeitgeist announced that "Wikipedia" was the eighth most-searched query on. In February 2005, Wikipedia reached third place behind Firefox and Valentine's Day. In June 2005, Wikipedia ranked first.

Lack of diversity, decline of authors and paid editing

On the 20th anniversary of Wikipedia, the German-language edition faced a number of problems. According to German media the most significant are a lack of diversity, a decline in active users and the influence of paid editing. While in 2006 there were 8,614 active authors in the German Wikipedia, in December 2018 there were only 5,262. Active Wikipedians only saw about 300 people as the "hard core" of the German Wikipedia who write articles.
As the number of authors decreases, the influence of a few increases, researchers found. The scientist Taha Yasseri describes those authors as "super editors" who write an excessive number of Wikipedia articles and thus keep the community project alive. It is problematic when "super editors" dominate much-discussed articles, build up an elite circle among themselves and "defend" their area.
German Wikipedia has been criticized for conflict-of-interest manipulations by paid editors who overwhelm a small number of administrators.
With the withdrawal of users and an interpretation of the rules that is not always perceived as appropriate, German Wikipedia can hardly counter the influence of lobby groups and paid editing.
the size of the German Wikipedia database is about 6 gigabytes.

Language and varieties of German

Separate Wikipedias have been created for several other varieties of German, including Alemannic German , Luxembourgish , Pennsylvania German , Ripuarian, Yiddish , Low German and Bavarian . These however, have less popularity than the German Wikipedia. There are also the Dutch Low Saxon and the .

Characteristics

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

Compared to the English Wikipedia, different criteria of 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.
The use of scholarly sources, in preference over journalistic and other types of sources, is more strongly encouraged. The German Verifiability guideline classifies scholarly sources as inherently more reliable than non-academic sources; the latter's use is 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 had been in a fully protected state for more than two weeks. This was the highest total of any of the Wikipedias, with the second-highest being 166 pages in the Japanese Wikipedia and 138 in the English Wikipedia., the German Wikipedia still had the highest percentage of semi-protected articles – 0.281% – among the ten largest Wikipedias, but in terms of the fraction of fully protected articles it ranked fourth, behind the Japanese, Portuguese and English Wikipedias.
Articles on indisputably notable subjects may be deleted if they are deemed too short. While the requirements for minimal articles 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" from the German Wikipedia.
Users do not have to create an account in order to start a new article.
Unlike the Cebuano, Polish, Dutch, Italian, Swedish or many other Wikipedias, the German one does not contain large collections of bot-generated geographical stubs or similar articles. On 2025-10-22 there are just 62 bots.
The German Wikipedia version did not have an Arbitration Committee until May 2007.
There is usually no need to classify a person with his or her gender, if the gender is undetermined; but in some places like list of female Nobel prize laureates is needed. All nouns are in masculine gender for persons like Bürger, and it will not be written in Bürger*in or other gender-neutral forms.
The equivalent to the English Wikipedia's featured articles and good articles are exzellente Artikel and lesenswerte Artikel.
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, a special format for meta data about persons, 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. 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. As of October 2025, the template is used in more than 1 million articles.
Like The Signpost in the English Wikipedia, the German Wikipedia also has its own internal newspaper, 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.
Reviewed versions

At Wikimania 2006, Jimmy Wales announced that the German Wikipedia would institute a system of "stable article versions", also known as sighting, on a trial basis. The system went live in May 2008. Certain users, so-called "active sighters", are now able to mark article versions as "reviewed", indicating that the text contains no obvious vandalism. A note in the top right corner of the screen indicates to the reader whether or not the present version of an article has already been reviewed, and provides access to the most recent reviewed version or a more current, unreviewed version as needed.
The German Wikipedia has two levels of sighting status which act like the English Wikipedia's pending changes protection: Passive sighter and Active sighter. The former is able to make changes to articles go live immediately if the last edit is marked as sighted, while only the latter allows manually reviewing pending changes.