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German controversy

German Wikipedia under fire from inclusionists

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By Tilman Bayer

On Thursday, a debate about deletion and notability (Relevanz) on the German Wikipedia that had been raging in the German blogosphere for several weeks culminated in a panel discussion hosted by Wikimedia Deutschland in its offices in Berlin.

The controversy had been triggered on 15 October by a posting on "Fefes Blog", a widely read blog run by Felix von Leitner, a programmer and hacker activist of the Chaos Computer Club (CCC). Von Leitner criticized the deletion of the article about MOGIS, an association of former child abuse victims which earlier this year had lent credibility to the "Zensursula" fight by Internet activists against Internet censorship in Germany (a controversy that had helped to increase membership of the German Pirate Party more than ten fold). Von Leitner was quickly joined in his criticism by numerous German bloggers, and fellow CCC activists such as Tim Pritlove, CCC speaker Frank Rieger, and Martin Haase[1], a professor of linguistics who is also a longtime editor of the German Wikipedia. The anger was fueled by deletion proposals for other article topics related to the hacker subculture: The Tschunk (a cocktail involving Club-Mate, a popular beverage in the German Hacker scene), "Zensursula" (a redirect) and the newly created article about Fefes Blog itself. But it was also based on a long-time frustration with what critics saw as an overly exclusionist and authoritarian Wikipedia culture.

Visualization of the "notability hurdle" used on the German Wikipedia's notability guideline page

Like other Wikipedias, the German Wikipedia has seen outside criticism of article deletions many times before (as well as dismissive comments about the amount of trivia and pop culture topics covered). But this time the controversy grew to an unprecedented scale and also got mainstream media coverage by Deutsche Presse-Agentur and others. Voices defending Wikipedia were in the minority, such as that of Torsten Kleinz (a journalist who has been covering Wikipedia for many years for Heinz Heise publications), who argued on his blog that "there would be no Wikipedia without notability criteria" and later published an article in c't magazine explaining the history of such conflicts on Wikipedia. Interviewed by weekly Die Zeit about the controversy, Arne Klempert (founding member of Wikimedia Deutschland and currently member of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation) also defended the necessity of notability criteria, and acknowledged that the German Wikipedia had a slightly more restrictive attitude than the English one.

Tim 'avatar' Bartel (Wikimedia Deutschland board member) deplored the factual inaccuracy and the vitriolic language of many inclusionist critics, collecting numerous examples of Godwin's law on Twitter and blogs, where Wikipedia admins were frequently called "deletion Nazis", Blockwarts and book burners. On the other hand, the Kurier (the Signpost's sister publication, which describes itself as "the tabloid magazine of the [German] Wikipedia community") had to learn a PR lesson about its long-time practice to welcome self-published opinion articles: a Wikipedian's piece lashing back against the perceived intrusion of bloggers into internal Wikipedia matters was entitled "Blogosphere, keep out!" and argued that blogs in general were conveying subjective half-truths and being written by "at best, second-rate scientists". It drew upset replies from outside bloggers (among them, unsurprisingly, a ScienceBlogs member) and was eventually removed out of concern that it was being misconstrued as a majority opinion of the community.

The Berlin panel consisted of two bloggers (Johnny Haeusler, well known for his "Spreeblick" blog, and Pavel Mayer) and two Wikipedia admins (Leon Weber and Martin Zeise), and was moderated by Pavel Richter (CEO of Wikimedia Deutschland). Several notable Wikipedians and critics also participated from the audience, among them Kurt Jansson (former head of Wikimedia Deutschland) and CCC speaker Frank Rieger who had demanded that Wikimedia Deutschland should start to fund a Deletionpedia-like repository of deleted articles immediately. Regarding some other criticism, an English language summary of the evening observed that it was addressing the attending Wikipedians directly as those responsible, unaware of Wikipedia's non-centralized power structure and diversity of opinion - for example, admin panelist Weber actually joined the critics in advocating a loosening of the notability guidelines.

Another point of criticism articulated especially by CCC's Frank Rieger was what he described as the deficient state of the Wikipedia software (specifically its lack of a user interface "from this millennium"), and blamed on the "elitist" nature of the German Wikipedia which according to Rieger deterred volunteer developers. It was unclear whether Rieger was aware of the international nature of MediaWiki development or of the fact that the Wikimedia Foundation's Usability Initiative has been employing professional programmers for a while. But one of the few tangible results of the controversy is indeed an already functional software to convert a MediaWiki XML dump into a Git repository. It was created by a CCC activist during what he describes as the recent "nerd uprising against the German Wikipedia and the exclusionist attitude that’s prevalent there" to enable the creation of an inclusionist fork of the German Wikipedia, employing Git's easy forking and merging features. The idea to apply the distributed revision control innovations which arose in software development in recent years to wikis and Wikipedia has been explored before, as evidenced by a February 2008 thread on Foundation-l discussing the Possibility of a git-based fully distributed Wikipedia and another thread from last month titled Wikipedia meets git.

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  • I'm German, and my home and the lion's share of my contributions is in the English Wikipedia. Paradoctor (talk) 01:12, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • An aspect of the controversy which could perhaps have been given more room is that many critics said they prefer the English Wikipedia over the German one, because of the former's supposedly more inclusionist attitude (sometimes even in the mistaken assumption that en: did not have notability criteria at all). Tim 'avatar' Bartel tried to dispel this notion by creating some statistics about the rate of successful requests for deletion in August and September 2009, and found it to be pretty much the same on de: and en: (about 60%). However, this approach disregards a lot of other factors. Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:51, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • Right, but you miss the fact that the relationship between total number of articles to requested deletions is totally different! Which by the way was also part of his statistic. It makes a different if you want to delete 60% of just less than 1million articles or delete 60% of more than 3 million articles ;-) cu AssetBurned (talk) 04:27, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • I already said that this analysis misses a lot of other factors, that was the reason I didn't include it in the article. (More examples: On de: IP editors can create articles, on en: they need an account; speedy deletions not taken into account, and the instrument of proposed deletions which does not exist on de:). Regards. HaeB (talk) 16:57, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I would have liked to have seen more arguments from the "inclusionist" side. What exactly is their complaint? Are they arguing just that de:wikipedia's notability bar is too high, or that there shouldn't be a bar at all? Powers T 13:49, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Both. There have been complains that the criteria for inclusion are way too high and should be lowered (that's also what various members of the de.WP community say). Others have suggested in blogs and comments that the criteria should be removed alltogether and that "if somebody writes a Wikipedia article about it, it's obviously 'relevant' enough for inclusion.". Some bloggers suggested a system for flagging articles as good/bad or notable/not notable (like slashdot's karma system, only the articles with enough votes would be visible to readers), or a new namespace that would include all the crap articles instead of deleting them. And I've read suggestions that WP should get some external help, some kind of board of experts that would decide about the inclusion of articles. Unfortunately, most suggestions suffer from a clear lack of insight about how Wikipedia actually works behind the scenes: the actual roles and power of admins, why some articles (copyvios, libel, denial of holocaust, etc..) have to be deleted to make the contents unaccessible to the public, how rules and guidelines are created and evolve over time, and how much work it takes just to keep the project clean of obvious vandalism/spam/POV/fakes etc. --Kam Solusar (talk) 19:00, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Admittedly the article was a bit short on summarizing the criticism (one reason I added this link to an English language summary of the panel debate). But that is also because it was written for Wikipedians, and most of the arguments and suggestions have been known on Wikipedia since the dawn of time (like those mentioned by Kam Solusar, or Wiki is not paper, and other Perennial proposals like "Deleted pages should be visible"). Fefe also critized range blocks (by an unfortunate coincidence, another speaker of the CCC seems to share an /17 range with one of the most notorious Nazi POV pushers on the German Wikipedia). Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:51, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • "You shouldn't have deleted that article!" Well, you had every opportunity to improve it. Very apt suggestion- "Blogosphere, get out!". In fact, I'm thinking that should be extended to basically everything. Hindsight is 20/20 when you critisize. But when people are called to PREVENT the things they later delight in complaining about, well, it's "not their problem". --King Öomie 17:32, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Apart from new articles on the German Wikipedia often seeing deletion requests within hours to days (and the requests mostly pushing for speedy deletion rather than creating leeway for improvement), relevance-based deletion most often seems to be based on the topic itself rather than the way it was presented. If it fails the notability criteria (or covers a topic a sizable fraction of the community thinks to have an axe to grind with), deletion, from my observations, usually is swift and indiscriminate towards article quality. --213.239.193.176 (talk) 05:31, 15 November 2009 (UTC) (4bpp, not logged in)[reply]
      • Isn't that the point? One of the (often unstated) objectives of the notability guidelines, at least on enwp, is that they shift the emphasis from how an article is written at the moment to its potential state. Potential, not just current state is actually a rallying cry for inclusionists (or eventualists, if you prefer), not deletionists, from what I've seen. —Emufarmers(T/C) 23:13, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Banned Mutter Erde has suggested to vote an admin, who has to check the deletion requests at the end of the day and to kick out all proposals, which are not fixed within the German "relevance criteria". This would concern a lot of fake requests (as models, for example) 78.55.9.33 (talk) 22:48, 10 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • "Banned Mutter Erde has suggested" - talking about yourself in third person, Mutti? ;-) --Kam Solusar (talk) 19:00, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
          • Sure, what else. I was a witness of this discussion and I have placed my suggestion there, as Mutter Erde of course. As far as I remember, I thanked for the microphone and Pavel Richter aka de:Benutzer:Schreibvieh, the moderator of this evening, thanked for my proposal. Gentlemen should be an example for the younger generation. Mutter Erde 92.227.131.116 (talk) 19:45, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm not sure I understand. What does "fixed" mean in relation to deletion requests? Powers T 12:45, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • For the most kind of people German wikipedia has created criteria to have a base, who is notable. But not for all, for example for models (dressed and nude). See this second (!) try to find some criteria for these people. They are not interested, because in the moment they would have some criteria, they couldn't delete them longer. As Pavel Mayer, a critic, who has sit on the podium, said: "We have one million articles in German wp, and we try to reduce them to 500000". wp.de is a bizarre address for authors :-) Regards 78.55.193.100 (talk) 13:20, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • "Fixed" is anon's translation of "fixiert", which means "codified" in this context. Paradoctor (talk) 16:06, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • That makes a lot more sense. How did you figure that out? Powers T 18:37, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thanks for the work on this story, HaeB; I've heard rumours of dissension at de:wp, but I couldn't figure out what was going on. Nyttend (talk) 04:52, 11 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • I found the title of this article is not NPOV. THe title imply that those complaining about the issue is just because of they are incusionist and not about the merit of the article. SYSS Mouse (talk) 19:07, 12 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't quite understand. The merit of which article? Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:51, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • is not the merit (of notability) of the articles being deleted . SYSS Mouse (talk) 04:49, 14 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Wikimedia.de has found a new way to collect money: Donate one Euro and you can tell your frustration: https://secure.wikimedia.de/spenden/list.php It works :-) 78.55.3.231 (talk) 00:23, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just to avoid misunderstandings, there is no functional Git-based fork yet (only the conversion software is functional, not the software necessary to display and edit articles from a Git repository). But work is ongoing, the author has explained the concept of a "distributed Wikipedia" further (Google translation) and an (ordinary) project wiki has been set up. The Chaos Computer Club might become involved providing hosting, and CCC's criticism of Wikipedia is likely to be a topic at the Chaos Communication Congress in December. Regards, HaeB (talk) 03:51, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • It would be nice if this article had had a really good editor go over it before (or after) it was posted. It is really verbose and confusing. Yours, GeorgeLouis (talk) 07:21, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • You are welcome to join us at the Newsroom and help write future articles. — Pretzels Hii! 21:53, 13 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • What a misleading title! First, the critics don't label themselves inclusionists, and if the label comes from somewhere else, I would really like to see a Reliable Source. Second, this is about much more than just the number of articles. --91.55.196.93 (talk) 06:43, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Well, it's in the nature of the discussion - the "delete fans" are termed exclusionist by the "create fans", which are termed inclusionists and so on... A big part of the problem is that "relevance", as other things, is defined in the eye of the requestor of an information, not in the eye of the server...

--84.151.174.85 (talk) 11:12, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

    • Inclusionism has long been the established term among Wikipedians to describe the philosophy behind this kind of criticism of deletions. Regards, HaeB (talk) 16:57, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Well the relevance criterias are so high now that there is not a single Stub in WP:DE. How can an article then improve by a bigger number of users if it will be deleted in one day? 91.11.237.51 (talk) 08:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • "No general proposition is worth a damn." I conducted a non-representative informal little survey of a sample of 20 random pages from each of en and de Wikipedias. IMO, about 30% of the German sample were stubs. The English sample had 8 stubs, 5 start class and 7 unassessed. The most important impression I took away was that assessment on en is imprecise, with a strong bias towards underestimating, and that the German pages looked somewhat smaller and neater. Most important lesson: Without a proper survey of representative samples, differences in content quality are not large enough to worry about, especially when considering that Wikipedia is still growing. For me, it is more a question of working environment. My fellow huns tend to focus more on process than my fellow English-speakers. Might have to do with much greater diversity of the English community, "families" tend to enjoy internecine warfare. Paradoctor (talk) 13:14, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Unfortunately, what we do in Germany (and german speaking countries) with wikipedia fulfills every cliche of "the ugly german": strict, mistrustful, unfriendly, authoritarian, narrow-minded, unwilling to reform. And the criticism that is often heard now concerning relevance-criteria applies to maybe one tenth of every deletion-discussion. Noone on no side says "lets just have bullshit in wikipedia". The conflicts arise because of serious, interesting articles, that are already there, that sometimes were there for years. And suddenly are to be deleteted. Another thing is the deletion-is-the-solution-mentality: its not well written? We should delete it, so someone "has space to write it new" (they really say that!) Its a stub? "Not enough, lets delete it at all, then someone, some expert, will write a long article". Its a new phenomenon seen and talked about on the net, there are no (not yet) paper sources? "delete it, this is just the internet". And so on. Unfortunately, the WP-"In-Group" in parts is not open to criticism at all, saying "its just these mad bloggers - they are irrelevant". Its a tragedy and a comedy. --91.5.200.41 (talk) 10:40, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • Not true at all - the criterias were discussed many times, there also was a Meinungsbild - something like a "large" community discussion followed by a poll (its none existant in en.wikipedia because there is no democratics at all) - showed that that a majority is for lower criterias. Anyways, these are mostly ignored by a vast majority of the Wikimedia Deutschland members (who also have a lot Wikikipedia administrators on their side). The deletion rules are ignored too very often - so articles, where the deletion request is no appropiate or violates the rules still got deleted in a high percentage. Most of the so called "inclusionists" don't want to include any crap article in the wikipedia - but why would you delete an article if its well written, relevant to enough people to visit the article a few hundred times a day (according to statistics) and has good citations - right, its the killer argument "Relevanz" - that is, what most people don't understand. A well written and cited article - even if its only relevant for a small group of people does not hurt anybody else --Suit (talk) 10:48, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • Very true. "The" wikipedia is unwilling to reform, because some old, influential Wikipedians dont want to. But a majority has obviously other ideas, and says that with "Meinungsbildern", but still the "In-Group" manages to push its own strict standards. --91.5.200.41 (talk) 10:53, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • But after all the criticism, I also have to admit, that you can already smell some kind of "glasnost and perestroika": People are much more aware now in the deletion-discussions and otherwise. But still, there is also the idea among some wikipedians, that there is no problem with de.wp at all, its just these loony bloggers. --91.5.200.41 (talk) 11:05, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Powers would like to see more arguments from the "Inclusionist" side. I am a founding member of the Wikimedia e.V. and a long-time Wikipedia author/proofreader/whatever, but I have never been an Admin. I am also a professor, and since I blog, I guess that makes me a second-rate researcher. Whatever. The point that I made at the meeting was that many of the people proposing deletions (and these are not only Admins, contrary to popular opinion) are young, males of German parentage who live in cities (someone added: childless) and they have a very biased view of what is "relevant", since the term is not an objective description. I have had articles deleted because they were about women (content moved to the page on the man who was their endeavor partner), or about some specific gender angle, or because they were about some part of rural German life (Freiwillige Feuerwehr, the volunteer fire departments which organize the social life in the country) that seems so insignificant from the heart of the capital city. Schools are considered not relevant, small towns, clubs, etc. Pavel Meyer (from the podium) wrote a fine blog article called "99% of all Germans are irrelevant" [2] (in German). A major problem is that many new articles are, in fact, garbage - random, childish ramblings put there to demonstrate that anyone can write nonsense in the WP. But the problem starts with stubs, with topics that are not mainstream, topics that only have a few (or -gasp!- no) Google-able links. There is also a tendency to write monstrous, long, all-encompassing papers about some topic and have many terms redirect there (even if the terms aren't actually used in the text!). This means that Interwiki-links become useless (they point to the umbrella term, not the exact term), the tools that look up a word on a web page in the German WP don't work anymore because the links are no longer there, etc. I feel that if an article is in NPOV and relevant to even 4 people, we should let it be! There is no problem with paper or printer's ink. Voice your concern on the discussion page, if need be, but quit deleting. Many important topics in, for example computer science, get deleted instead of getting fixed. This is one reason I personally have quit writing for the German WP - investing time to write something that gets deleted instead of improved is a waste of my time. --WiseWoman (talk) 11:22, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is an misunderstanding of "notablility" on both sides. The criteria should not determine if an object is relevant in a philosophical matter. The main question ist: can Wikipedia have a good article about this subject? If there are only four people who read an article - there is only little chance for it to improve. If there is no reliable documentation available, how do you identify hoaxes? --84.166.53.197 (talk) 15:11, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is the strong bias towards deletion which originates from more people not knowing about a subject than people knowing about a subject than people caring about a subject than people writing about a subject. So where does that leave people *interested* in a subject? --77.116.49.250 (talk) 22:06, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
      • How strong this bias ist, is not very clear to me. En.wp has excluded IP users from starting new articles - this is a pretty strong statement, too. Also the percentage of deleted articles in de.wp and en.wp is rougly the same.
      • I don't know if en.wp is friendlier or simply slower. Chunk (cocktail) is still readable, but there are two warnings that this article is unreliable and is in urgent need of an expert - who might never come and improve the article. Eventually it might get deleted or forgotten. Chunk does not mention the new article. --84.166.124.96 (talk) 07:53, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
        • Now it does. ;) "Eventually it might": Sure, but it also might be improved, eventually. That's the whole idea of giving less-than-satisfactory efforts time to develop. Paradoctor (talk) 09:00, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Why isn't there one set of rules for all Wikipedia projects? Why should a german Wikipedia have different rules than an english Wikipedia or a russian one ...? I think this is the issue Wikimedia Foundation should adress. --Wikieditoroftoday (talk) 11:55, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

  • The article omits a few things. Like for example, that a wikipedia critical journalist got his accreditation revoked at the door of the panel venture, just after traveling 350 km to attend the event. Or that the conclusion by the panel was already prepared before the panel took actually place. Such selective omissions, and stacking of the card deck, is what annoys people to no end about the German wikipedia Mischpoche. But what do I know? I am just a dirty blogger, with a real job. 80.137.12.201 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 15:04, 15 November 2009 (UTC).[reply]
You forgot some things, too - The journalist didn't have an accreditation and he had published some "satirical" death threats to administrators previously on de.wp, after he lost an argument about the inclusion of certain JFK conspiracies. --84.166.53.197 (talk) 15:47, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Yes he had. It was requested by Heise and granted by Wikimedia. Stop spreading misinformation. --91.55.196.93 (talk) 17:33, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for providing this example of bending the truth. It is a typical example how German wikipediaists construct their own truth and define relevance as 'how I want the world to be'. 80.137.12.201 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 18:45, 15 November 2009 (UTC).[reply]
      • So we disagree on an technicality, but we are agree concerning the death threats including details ob the threatened administrator's real life? --84.166.124.96 (talk) 07:35, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Stop making things up. --193.254.155.48 (talk) 11:33, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
          • I have no first hand knowledge about this, but the exact wording can be found here, Markus Kompa confirms the episode in the following thread. --82.113.121.129 (talk) 14:41, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]


  • In respect to my comments on the state of the software foundation of Wikipedia, I am of course aware that MediaWiki is an international effort and had paid coders in the past. But, to be blunt, the screaming misery already punches you in the face when you click "add a comment" on this page here. Instead of poping up a comment form, as anyone would expect, I need to edit a wikipage. It is 2009, there has been research on user interfaces for decades now and countless web services have shown how a modern UI should look like. And it also has been shown time and again that decent, guiding user interfaces can massively reduce the amount of vandalism and garbage coming in. Refusing to modernize and raising to accepted and expected standards alienates potential users and authors and creates lots of unnecessary work for volunteers, whos energy could be much better used in enhancing the content. So the software currently quite properly reflects the "our way or the highway" mindset that is at the core of the current crisis. Frank Rieger. Zapfdingbatz (talk) 17:24, 15 November 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zapfdingbatz (talk • contribs) 17:17, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • The larger and more successful something becomes, the more conservative it tends to be in its ways. There is a sliver lining, though. Paradoctor (talk) 17:40, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are some deficits about this articles I'd like to amend. First of all, it sounds like the problem arose from the "CCC" and "Blog" parts of the net. This is not true. The problem arose within the german Wikipedia and, for example, made me write an article about some Austria-related topic in the english instead of the german Wikipedia *four years ago*. Why? Because at that time, everything austrian was questioned the hell out of it, since the majority of active Wikipedia cleanup crew members were german and behaved like there could never ever exist something notable in Austria (I'm exaggerating, but that was essentially the feeling you got). So, this problem was there years, probably even half a decade ago. Now Fefe launched one of his attacks (and believe me, if you read his blog regularly, you understand the notion of "one of") - and it hit gold. Usually, it doesn't, and Fefe's rants are more or less idle, humorous. This time, it hit a nerve of a lot of people, some being people like me who identify with Wikipedia like they rarely identify with anything else; some being people like Fefe who are just pissed off that there seem to be an "elite movement" within wikipedia which targets the own interest group (like, those CCC related articles which got deleted); some being pissed off because their articles got deleted; some being emberassed about the "typical" german knowitall-bully revenant; some being just austrian and pissed at the underrepresentation of austrians; some being active authors having to put up with three times the work of writing an article due to neverending discussions; and some being just trolls. And all of those people are now guilty by association and thus their legitmate plea being rhetorically and exemplary dismissed. As you can imagine, the "blogosphere" lashed out on wikipedia, because they are the ones who already have a platform for that kind of critique, but the support (and this is the important part) came from a much broader basis of former and not-anymore-so potential future authors. But what do we want? Certainly not people who don't seem to know what is notable for fields they have no clue in. The "Tschunk incident" is a very good example. Imagine this cocktail made from an unusual soda (Club Mate) with unusual methods (like the particular slicing of the limes and the amount of crushed ice) for unusual people (hackers ;) - now, this drink made its way all the way from Berlin to Vienna, where it is regularly made at the Metalab at parties. Among those parties is the couch surfing party, where the barkeeper has to answer two out of three guests what exactly that "Tschunk" is. Now imagine 500 people leaving from that venue, trying to figure out what that drink was. Well, it is not notable, thus not in the german Wikipedia. Now ironically, the english speaking folk can look it up whereas the german speaking crowd . But is that all? It certainly is not. During the discussion of notability criterias, a lot of people ended up with the thought, that nobody can really reliably comment on notability except those ultimately touched by the subject. So, the only means for the community to ensure quality are objective measures, such as references, quality of writing and a neutral point of view. This should take care of the quality problem, and leave the criteria of "notability" for later generations to be judged. --77.116.49.250 (talk) 21:40, 15 November 2009 (UTC) (edited and extended)[reply]
As for the "deficits", I am not sure if you are fully aware of the purpose and audience of the Wikipedia Signpost and this article. The aim was not to discuss the general problems of notability, deletions or quality. As a conservative estimate, many thousands of Wikipedians and observers have debated them for the most part of this decade, so in itself the topic can hardly be considered newsworthy for the Signpost. What justified coverage instead was the unprecedented form the debate recently took outside Wikipedia, and this newsworthy part certainly started with MOGIS and Fefe.
As for the Tschunk article, in its current state it does not satisfy the policies of the English Wikipedia either and is likely to get deleted sooner or later. (And by the way, I personally think it rather nicely demonstrates why references should be required even for content that was written by established Wikipedians with academic credentials - it contains an unsourced claim by Maha about the interaction of alcohol and caffeine which is highly dubious in the light of studies like this.)
Your last point relates to WP:GNG, which might indeed be a significant difference between the English and German Wikipedia, but that's a question which will need to be explored elsewhere.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 16:57, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • German language Wikipedia has repeatedly deleted the article about itself (de:Deutschsprachige_Wikipedia), and prevented re-creation. I wonder when they'll delete the mainpage, too. -- Matthead  Discuß   02:04, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    • 19:46, 15. Nov. 2009 Guandalug (A) (Diskussion | Beiträge) schützte „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ [create=sysop] (unbeschränkt) ‎ (Schutz vor Neuanlage) (Versionen)
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    • 18:16, 15. Nov. 2009 Tilla (Diskussion | Beiträge) hat „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ gelöscht ‎ (Kein Artikel oder kein enzyklopädischer Inhalt)
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    • 02:14, 5. Mai 2006 Factumquintus (Diskussion | Beiträge) hat „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ gelöscht ‎ (Deutschsprachige Wikipedia Ein hochreines, spagyrisches (Spagyrik ist ein in Deutschland ist ein zugelassenes Herstellungsverfahren von Medikamenten , öh)
    • 16:15, 26. Apr. 2006 Zinnmann (Diskussion | Beiträge) hat „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ gelöscht ‎ (Inhalt war: '#REDIRECT Benutzer:Syrcro/Deutschsprachige Wikipedia' (einziger Bearbeiter: 'Benutzer:Zinnmann') - Benutzer_Diskussion:Zinnmann)
    • 16:14, 26. Apr. 2006 Zinnmann (Diskussion | Beiträge) hat „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ nach „Benutzer:Syrcro/Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ verschoben ‎ (zurück verschieben)
    • 16:13, 26. Apr. 2006 Zinnmann (Diskussion | Beiträge) hat „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ wiederhergestellt ‎ (33 Versionen wiederhergestellt.)
    • 21:05, 1. Feb. 2006 Elian (Diskussion | Beiträge) hat „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ gelöscht ‎ (Inhalt war: '#REDIRECT Deutsche_Wikipedia' (einziger Bearbeiter: 'Benutzer:Xsnoopy') - Benutzer_Diskussion:Xsnoopy)
    • 14:23, 23. Jan. 2006 Uwe Gille (Diskussion | Beiträge) hat „Deutschsprachige Wikipedia“ gelöscht ‎ (s. Wikipedia:Löschkandidaten/15. Januar 2006)
LOL 78.55.155.143 (talk)
  • Asking the relevant or not relevant question: "How much wikipedia the donors get for their money?" is a bit risky in wp.de. This IP was blocked after this contribution.btw.: The blocklog shows currently the wikipedia advertising: "Wikipedia - Für die Zukunft" (Wikipedia-For the future) :-)) 78.55.155.143 (talk) 12:05, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Mutter Erde ;) The log entry seems to indicate that your IP was blocked because you are a banned user on the German Wikipedia, not because you asked that question. In any case, this page is not the best forum to discuss administrative decisions from dewiki in detail. Regards, HaeB (talk) 16:57, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Please, do never believe - I repeat NEVER! - believe User:Seewolf aka H.K.! And if you don't want to believe me, then click here de:Benutzer Diskussion:Cascari/Nicht vergessen!. As far as I know, you have the tools to prove his claim i.e. his rubbish. Thank you and regards. btw. Nice article. Congrats :-) 78.55.155.143 (talk) 18:14, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]
And? What you have found on the Cascari site? Any rants?
This current IP is also blocked by User:Seewolf, after of this note. Anyone here, who can give a link to an old statement by Jimbo? Or should I better ask him again? 78.55.244.127 (talk) 15:18, 18 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]


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