Stan Shebs schrieb:
Pete Bartlett wrote:
Why is de: better than en: is a great question. They appear to have covered classic encyclopedic topics much better than en: and their proportion of Exzellente Artikeler is double that of our FAs, despite standards. How to learn from de would be a great thing to discuss.
In a word: "Ordnung".
The full range of connotation is not easily translated into English, but the disambig for de:'s [[Ordnung]] connects to lots of telling things, such as en:'s [[social structure]] and the like. At the risk of playing amateur sociologist and offending everybody, I'll opine that while the German cultural liking for "Ordnung" sounds to USians and Brits an awful lot like a compulsion to "follow orders", in the WP context I think it translates to a greater sense of duty to help achieve communal goals.
As a german Wikipedian, I would dispute this. It is definitely not Ordnung and a sense of duty which makes the difference between English and German Wikipedia. And even if this claim comes up again and again, I'm not even sure that German Wikipedia is really better than English Wikipedia. They are different and have different strengthes.
Now...let me collect some differences, I leave it to the reader to draw his own conclusions.
On 2nd April 2006 the category:Living people on en contained 81.930 entries while the number of _all_ german articles tagged with Personendaten (=almost all wikified biographies) was 86.830. I was surprised.
When I compare RfA on en and de, I count support votes on en: 31, 53, 45, 48, 61, 81, 28, 76, 50 on de: 72 (loosing candidate), 6 (loosing candidate), 93, 143 (loosing candidate!), 92, 55 It seems rather strange to me that the bigger community has less participation on such an important topic as is "who should become admin". I didn't look at the criteria voters use on en, but they might be also a bit different. On de candidates who really do a lot of useful cleanup work are regularly turned down if they are not able to show that they are also good authors. Other no-nos are bad behaviour, ignorance and especially ignorance and wrong actions in image right questions.
Social structure. The german wikipedia has a geographical advantage here because it covers a smaller area than the english. I may be a bit exceptional but my estimate is that I've met at least 150 wikipedians in person. Those 150 wikipedians know others who know others... there is a rather close network of personal relationships among german wikipedians (including of course the wikipedians from Austria and Switzerland). This becomes especially important in case of conflicts: a good editor in wikistress, deleting his userpage and quitting? He'll be flooded with emails and maybe a calm discussion with one of his friends on the phone will sort the problem out.
Let's look at the structure of the IRC channels now. English wikipedia has the general channel #wikipedia with an extremely low signal to noise ratio, the a bit more quiet #wikipedia-en and - I may be mistaken on the following: a closed admin channel, a bootcamp, mediation, probation and esperanza (whatever this is).
German wikipedia has: the general channel #wikipedia-de for socializing, coordinating general work on the wiki, discussing events on wp, calling an admin for quick vandal bans etc. Rarely people who chat too much off topic (=not wikipedia related) receive a friendly kick. Other channels: #hist.wikipedia where most historians hang out. #phil.wikipedia - meeting channel for the philosophers. #bio.wikipedia - home of the biologists. Some people frequent only the topic channels and not the general one. The biology channel was the first topic channel set up and reflects the strength of the german wikipedia in biology. The Projekt:Lebewesen (living beings) is the most active project on de and they fill one whole column on featured articles alone (the historians are catching up).
General atmosphere. It's difficult to get hard data on this, but the thing I hear most often is: atmosphere on the English Wikipedia is much more relaxed and people are friendlier and politer. There are even a few users who left the German Wikipedia with this reason and work only on en. So it might be true. This feeling is often connected to the behaviour on AfD. Hurtful comments are frequent there, combined with a much lower threshold for AfD: articles which are tagged as stub on en are usually proposed for deletion on de (and either expanded or deleted).
One group of prominent editors sticks to the maxims on the page "Be cruel" (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sei_grausam ). This is not meant literally, but in the sense of Larry Sanger: To attract and retain the participation of experts, there would have to be little patience for those who do not understand or agree with Wikipedia's mission, or even for those pretentious mediocrities who are not able to work with others constructively and recognize when there are holes in their knowledge (collectively, probably the most disruptive group of all). A less tolerant attitude toward disruption would make the project more polite, welcoming, and indeed open to the vast majority of intelligent, well-meaning people on the Internet. --Larry Sanger
Refering to this "meme" (it's not a guideline), users have - undisputed by the community - been blocked for "disturbing good authors from writing articles". Leads to blocking and banning customs. The german wikipedia has no arbitration committee. A poll to establish one has not reached a necessary majority, the community divided about the question. Long term bans are decided by a community vote, short term bans are pronounced at the individual admin's own discretion. If another admins thinks a ban too harsh, he may shorten or lift it. Wheel wars about such issues are rare, though.
Wikipedia namespace. This topic probably comes closest to Stan's assumption of "Ordnung". Personally, I love the Wikipedia namespace in the English Wikipedia. There is so much to discover, so many obscure, interesting or funny pages. However, without counting, I have the impression that en has many many more pages in this namespace than de. When I look in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_style_guidelines I find a huge number of good advices, guides for almost everything (hey, even a whole page for how to set dashes). The number of german pages is much lower. Pages in the Wikipedia namespace are routinely scrutinized if they are really necessary and often merged into existing ones or deleted. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Usability/%C3%9Cbersicht is a rather complete overview of all important documentation pages.
Last point of this long mail: the impressive german projects like the printed wikireaders, the DVD, the writing contest with big media echo etc. In my opinion, these are due to several factors: 1) the independence of the german community from Jimbo and the Wikimedia Foundation. The English Wikipedia is very much a monarchy, with people looking to Jimbo for advice and guidance. The german wikipedia had and has nobody with Jimbo's authority. People had to deal with the fact that there is no ultimate appeal. This has consequences for the social structure (which evolved to what I'd characterize as a meritocracy with a few prominent and influential editors) but also for the possibility to realize such projects. People had to act on their own, so they did it. 2) Personal dedication and leadership of individual Wikipedians. Most projects were team work, but there was usually one person who invested much more work than the others. The driving force behind Wikipedia academy in June is one editor, Frank. The driving force behind many successful initiatives like the writing contest is Achim Raschka. The driving force behind the Wikipedia exhibition were Frank for the organisation and me for the realization. The WikiReaders were produced by individuals. etc. 3) For the DVD and WikiPress: the luck to find a good partner company which is crazy enough to take up the accompanying risks and whose bosses and employees "grok" the Wiki way. The first thing Vlado, one of the Directmedians, did after the first CD was finally ready for production was to expand the article Reggae to double its size - at 3 o'clock at night. Just to relax...
So much for a comparison between English and German Wikipedia. I noticed that I wrote much more about de, as I know the project much better. Maybe someone else could add more facts about en. I'm placing this text also on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elian/comparison - feel free to edit and add comments there (and of course fix my bad english ;-).
greetings, elian