page_title: German Wikipedia
section_title: Characteristics
hierarchical_section_title: German Wikipedia / Characteristics
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: 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 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.
  The German Wikipedia version did not have an Arbitration Committee until May 2007. Currently, German Wikipedia's Arbitration Committee plays 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 from 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 thi
caption: Daily requests for deletion, de facto deleted articles and the ratio of these two values
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