German Wikipedia
German Wikipedia is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia. Started in May 2001, this edition has more than 235,000 articles, as of May 2005, and is the second largest one, next to the English edition.
In September 2004, the German Wikipedia was evaluated against the Brockhaus Multimedial and the localized edition of Microsoft's Encarta by c't, a respected computer magazine. On a scale from 0 to 5, Wikipedia 'won' with a total score of 3.4. [1]
A few weeks later, the weekly newspaper Die Zeit also compared content from Wikipedia with other reference works and found that Wikipedia only has to "share its lead position in the field of natural science." [2].
In November 2004, Directmedia Publishing GmbH started distributing a CD-ROM containing a German Wikipedia snapshot [3]. Some 40,000 CDs were sent to registered customers of directmedia. The .iso file was distributed via eMule and BitTorrent and in December, the CHIP computer magazine had this program on the DVD of its current issue. A DVD was released by Directmedia on 6. April 2005, the same day the German Wikipedia fork http://www.wikiweise.de/ went online.
In the January 2005 Google Zeitgeist announced that "Wikipedia" was the #8 most searched query on Google.de, ranking only behind the tsunami, George Bush, firefox, schnappi, Rudolph Moshammer, Saturn, and Angelina Jolie. In February 2005 Wikipedia reached third place behind Firefox and Valentine's Day.