Concept
The German Wikipedia (Deutschsprachige Wikipedia) is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia. Founded on March 16, 2001, it is the second-oldest Wikipedia (after the English Wikipedia). It has articles, making it the -largest edition of Wikipedia by number of articles , behind the English Wikipedia and the mostly bot-generated Cebuano Wikipedia. It has the second-largest number of edits behind the English Wikipedia and over 260,000 disambiguation pages. On November 7, 2011, it became the second edition of Wikipedia, after the English edition, to exceed 100 million page edits. The German Wikipedia is criticized because of several ongoing political manipulations by paid editors who overwhelm a small number of administrators. 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 (revision #9), 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 verein concept solidified the German Wikipedia's culture. The geography of Europe facilitated face-to-face meetups among German Wikipedians. On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia edition exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the first edition after the English-language Wikipedia to do so. The millionth article was Ernie Wasson. In November 2008, 90% of the edition's articles had more than 512 bytes, 49% had more than 2 kilobytes, and the average article size was 3,476 bytes.
