page_title: German Wikipedia
section_title: CD/DVD April 2005
hierarchical_section_title: German Wikipedia / Off-line publication / CD/DVD April 2005
context_page_description: The German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia.
  Founded in March 2001, it is the second-oldest, after the English Wikipedia, and with 2,473,076 articles, at present the fourth-largest edition of Wikipedia by number of articles, behind the English Wikipedia and the mostly bot-generated Swedish Wikipedia and Cebuano Wikipedia. It has the second-largest number of edits behind the English Wikipedia and over 260,000 disambiguation pages. On 7 November 2011, it became the second edition of Wikipedia, after the English edition, to exceed 100 million page edits.
  It is the third edition, behind the English Wikipedia and the French Wikipedia by depth and by number of active users.
  It is the fourth edition, behind the English Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia and the French Wikipedia by number of users.
  On 21 March 2019 the German Wikipedia went offline to inform users about the situation of the European Union's copyright law reformation, the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, which has been voted on in the European Parliament on 27 March 2019.
context_section_description: A new release of Wikipedia content was published by Directmedia on 6 April 2005. This package consisted of a 2.7 GB DVD and a separate bootable CDROM (running a version of Linux with Firefox). The CDROM did not contain all the data, but was included to accommodate users without DVD-drives. The DVD used Directmedia's Digibib software and article format; everything could be installed to a hard drive. In addition, the DVD contained an HTML tree, as well as Wikipedia articles formatted for use with PDAs (specifically, the Mobipocket and TomeRaider formats).
  The production of the DVD motivated the Personendaten project (see above).
  The vetting process was similar to the one for the CD described above and took place on a separate MediaWiki server. The process took about a week and involved 33 Wikipedians, communicating on IRC. To prevent duplication of work, editors would protect every article that they had reviewed; links to protected articles were shown in green. Lists of potential spammed or vandalized articles had been produced ahead of time with SQL queries. Unacceptable articles were simply deleted on the spot. While the XML articles for the earlier CD version had been produced from HTML, this time a script was used to convert Wiki markup directly to the Digibib format. The final DVD contained about 205,000 articles, with every article linking to a list of contributors.
  Directmedia sold 30,000 DVDs, at €9.90 each. This price included 16% taxes and a one-euro donation to Wikimedia Deutschland; production costs were about €2.
  The DVD image can also be downloaded for free.
  Following the successful launch of the DVD, Directmedia donated high-resolution pictures of 10,000 public domain paintings to Wikimedia Commons (see related Signpost story).
caption: DVD Label of German off-line Wikipedia publication.
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