Wikipedia’s nonprofit status questioned by D.C. U.S. attorney

What a contrast to the early days: 22 years ago I was simply appointed admin on the German language Wikipedia when there was simply a lack of hands doing deletions and stuff. No voting, just a show of hand a lots of trust put into people only know by what they write and discuss on this new website.

A few years of work (10k edits) and a few years of dwindling participation on my side someone noticed that quite a few of those early admins never faced a vote at all. The process had re-elections when 25 wikipedians asked for a vote, took them almost three weeks, I got that treatment as well in 2009. Indeed someone had enough time to dig through and find a discussion where I wasn't the nicest person (at the same time writing and discussing on Wikipedia help me a lot to develop a healthy social skill). Well, I didn't use the admin rights anymore so I rather resigned before someone dug even deeper ;)

For security reasons those admin rights should be time limited anyways.

In my experience (of also roughly 20 years ago), the German Wikipedia is as dysfunctional as it gets.

The primary goal of the admins seemed to be to gatekeep, in particular to keep “unencyclopedic” content out at all cost, e.g. by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.

“Just because it’s relevant on en.wikipedia.org doesn’t mean it’s relevant over here” is a sentence I heard frequently. Keeping the number of articles down was seen as an active ideal.

For me, it was a great motivator to improve my English, and I’ve only ever looked back when the English version didn’t have a lot of information on some Germany-specific topic. Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia…

> by contesting the very existence of articles on individual episodes of TV shows, software, or video games, which are all completely uncontroversial on the English one.

In the first year or so of the english Wikipedia, I was very engaged in adding content but never really tried to engage with the community. I started adding articles about my topic of interest at the time, which was New York 80s punk and hardcore bands. Soon, I had the lot of my articles deleted for "lacking relevance".

I haven't been contributing much since.

Yeah, Palestinians are indeed Semites, however, the word antisemitism (for historic reasons) is used to refer specifically to hatred of Jews. It makes historical sense that Germans are afraid to criticize the Jews.

I probably disagree with your opinions, but the debate would likely be useless.

One of the obstacles to getting that point of view across is that very few of the people in countries with a majority religion (which is most countries) see criticism of their government's history as criticism of their religion. I've never really heard a Christian complain about the treatment of the thirty years war in history books, and that's presented in an extremely negative light. The equation you're making doesn't have a lot of traction in the broader world.

Is the eV still in that renovated building near the Chinese embasy, playing cards every Wednesday near the river?

It's not documenting historical facts about Israel that's problematic, it's using that history to justify calls for the destruction of Israel. Does anyone cite the Thirty Years' War to advocate for the destruction of Germany?

One issue that occurs is when person A is criticized for documenting historical facts on the basis that since person B has in other contexts used them as a pretext for something wrong, person C, after finding out about the historical facts, might independently come to the same conclusion as person B. The effect is to treat person A's documentation activity with the same approach as person C's eventual choices.

The German Wikipedia is the main reason I keep my country setting on DDG off. That way I get en.wikipedia.org results first.

> Last time I checked, they only just accepted the redesign (the one that greatly improves legibility), after vetoing it for years. What a psychotic way to run an encyclopedia

I once asked on (then) Twitter why they kept that crappy design, and got the most depressing NIMBY answers on even making the new design optional. That really killed any rest of hope I had for the German Wikipedia. Glad to hear that at least that tiny improvement made it.