[12][13] Compared to the English Wikipedia, the German edition tends to be more selective in its coverage, often rejecting small stubs, articles about individual fictional characters and similar materials.

A dedicated article about a single fictional entity generally exists only if the character in question has a very significant impact on popular culture (for example, Hercule Poirot).

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.

[18][19][20] 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.

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.

Certain users, so-called "active sighters", are now able to mark article versions as "reviewed", indicating that the text contains no obvious vandalism.

As a result of this meeting, regularly striking round tables (called "Wikipedia-Stammtisch") established themselves at various places in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

[35] Each spring and autumn, the German Wikipedia organizes a writing contest, where a community-elected jury rates nominated articles.

A trial to extend the contest to an international level met with limited success, with only the Dutch, English and Japanese Wikipedias participating.

[37] In March 2007, the sixth contest was held, with the winner being the article on the Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (German: Haager Konvention zum Schutz von Kulturgut bei bewaffneten Konflikten).

[40] The friendly meeting saw a lively discussion of the differing approaches to writing an encyclopedia; it became clear that Brockhaus had closely observed Wikipedia for quite some time.

In June 2007, a project on renewable resources (WikiProjekt Nachwachsende Rohstoffe) was initiated,[41][42] the goal being to write and improve articles on the topic.

The German Wikipedia had a rather lengthy (about 600,000 characters) discussion about the suitable title and categories, inasmuch as numerous Austrian authors denied the description of Donauturm as a "TV tower".

"[47] The DVD version of Spring 2005 received a rather negative review by Björn Hoffmann – product manager working for the Bibliographisches Institut & F.A.

[48] In November 2005 the OpenUsability project in cooperation with the Berlin-based Relevantive AG conducted a usability test of the German Wikipedia.

The test was commissioned to a research institute (Cologne-based WIND GmbH), whose analysts assessed 50 articles from each encyclopedia (covering politics, business, sports, science, culture, entertainment, geography, medicine, history and religion) on four criteria (accuracy, completeness, timeliness and clarity), and judged Wikipedia articles to be more accurate on average (1.6 on a scale from 1 to 6, versus 2.3 for Brockhaus with lower = better).

[47] The display and search software used for the project, Digibib, had been developed by Directmedia Publishing for earlier publications; it ran on Windows and Mac OS X (and later also on Linux).

[56] To produce the CD, a dump of the live Wikipedia had been copied to a separate server, where a team of 70 Wikipedians vetted the material, deleting nonsense articles and obvious copyright violations.

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.

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).

The next edition of Wikipedia content was issued in December 2005 by the publisher Zenodot Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, a sister company of Directmedia.

These books, published by Zenodot, consisted of a collection of Wikipedia articles about a common topic, selected and edited by so-called "Wikipeditors" who may receive compensation from Directmedia.

In mid-November 2005, it was discovered that an anonymous user had entered hundreds of articles from older encyclopedias that had been published from the 1960s to the 1980s in East Germany.

This was made difficult by the fact that the old encyclopedias were not online and not easily available from many West German libraries, and that the user had used numerous different IP addresses.

In November 2008, Lutz Heilmann, a member of the German parliament, obtained a preliminary injunction against Wikimedia Deutschland e. V., forbidding the forwarding of www.wikipedia.de to de.wikipedia.org.

According to Focus Online, Heilmann objected to claims that he had not completed his university degree, and that he had participated in a business venture involving pornography.

The report also suggests that the Wikipedia article had been repeatedly altered in line with his claims by an anonymous user operating within the Bundestag building, but Heilmann denied having been involved in an edit war.

Heilmann announced on 16 November that he would drop the legal proceedings against Wikimedia Deutschland, regretting that many uninvolved users of the encyclopedia had been affected.

[74] In 2015, the Reiss Engelhorn Museum sued the WMF and its German chapter Wikimedia Deutschland for alleged copyright violations of 17 public domain pictures.

It was ad-supported, used its own software (but a similar wiki markup), admitted only registered editors, and prominently displayed the real names of every article's major contributors.