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The Week in Germany: Culture September 8, 2006 Will German Wikipedians Continue to Go their Own Way?
The German-language version of the free online user-edited encyclopedia Wikipedia is the second largest Wikipedia site in the world, after the English-language version. With 450,000 articles edited by 30,000 thousand users, Wikipedia is among the ten most popular sites in Germany, ahead of Amazon and Microsoft. Last week, the online magazine Perlentaucher.de published an essay about an interesting discrepancy between the German and other foreign-language Wikipedias and the larger English-language site (over 1.3 million articles). In early 2005, Wikipedia adopted the use of Google’s “nofollow” code, which prevents Google and other search engines from using outgoing links in Wikipedia to compile rankings that determine which pages appear first in search results (more incoming links equals a higher ranking). Google developed the code in response to the phenomenon of “linkspam,” which are phony entries in public forums containing links to commercial websites in order to increase their visibility in Google searches. Since websites with the most links pointing to them in the Internet appear highest on Google searches, Internet marketers wrote programs that post links to commercial sites in public forums on the Internet hoping to gain higher rankings from Google and other search engines. The nofollow code was created by Google to foil this kind of Internet vandalism. After the nofollow code was introduced, a vigorous debate broke out among English-speaking Wikipedians about whether the measure did more to protect counteract linkspam or prevent the promotion of high value sources. Those in the camp who felt that the nofollow code hindered the development of the Web eventually won out, and the code was removed from the English language site in March 2005. According to the Perlentaucher article, German Wikipedians remained conspicuously silent on the issue, and the site continues to use the nofollow code. The author, Christoph Mayerl, suggests that the German Wikipedia’s nofollow stance (which is shared by the other non-English Wikipedias) reflects a utopian view of Wikipedia as a refuge of order and discipline in the otherwise chaotic World Wide Web. In fact, the German Wikipedia does contain some other unique features that seem designed to enhance discipline among users, and, by extension, the reliability of content. According to Wikipedia, some German Wikipedians use a “Vertrauensnetz” or “web of trust”, which is a list of other users that a given user trusts. Readers can view a list of all the Wikipedians who trust the author or editor of a given article, which functions as a barometer of accuracy. Regardless whether these differences reflect a cultural quirk among German Wikipedians, they are just as responsive and dynamic as their English-speaking counterparts: Within days after the Perlentaucher article was posted, the German-language entry on nofollow had been edited sixteen times, and a link to the article had been added. Links
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