German Wikipedia Back Online After Controversial Shutdown – ReadWriteWeb
Written by Frederic Lardinois / November 17, 2008
After it had been unavailable in Germany for more than two days, the Wikipedia’s German portal is finally back online. The local German version of the Wikipedia had become unavailable after a member of the German parliament, Lutz Heilmann, pressed charges against the German Wikipedia because of defamatory statements in his biography on the site. Heilmann argued that the article was “false and slanderous.” A German judge then ordered the closure of the German portal for the Wikipedia, wikipedia.de.
The Wikipedia entry about Heilmann, who is no stranger to controversy, accused the politician of sending threatening text messages to his ex-partner and stated that Heilmann was about to lose his diplomatic immunity. There have indeed been rumors that Heilmann is under investigation by the German parliament because of these reports, though other statements in the article about the questionable status of his college degree and his involvement in an online pornography venture are rather questionable.
‘Unintentional’
heilmann_mugshot.jpgAfter assessing the damage he had done, Heilmann, according to a post on his own site, has now decided not to press any further charges against the non-profit organization behind the German Wikipedia project, though he might still press charges against the authors of the controversial statements in his Wikipedia entry. In this statement, Heilmann argues that he never intended for the whole site to be shut down because of this, but that he wasn’t able to stop the German bureaucracy from taking its course during the weekend because of a legal error in his request to have the ban overturned.
Streisand Effect
Of course, the whole affair spectacularly backfired on Heilmann and turned out to be a boon for the German Wikipedia, which collected donations worth over 32,000 Euros during the weekend. The controversial article about Heilman was read over half a million times since last Friday.
AP, German Wikipedia back online after dispute, By THOMAS SEYTHAL
FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) — The German-language portal to the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia was back online Monday after a left-wing lawmaker dropped a legal complaint.
A Luebeck state court had ordered the site shut down over the weekend after Left Party lawmaker Lutz Heilmann claimed the German entry about him contained false allegations.
Court documents say Heilmann objected to the entry’s claims that he once threatened a former partner and that he had not been open about his past with East Germany’s secret Stasi police.
Heilmann told The Associated Press he did not want to cut off Wikipedia users, but wanted these “points removed.”
He withdrew his legal challenge Monday after the disputed passages were removed from the article on Wikipedia — a free online encyclopedia written collaboratively by volunteers and open to anybody for editing. The site relies on its contributors to recognize errors in postings and edit them out.
“I have always relied on the self-cleaning process,” Heilmann said, but added that it had not worked in his case.
The German site http://www.wikipedia.de links users to the U.S.-based German-language version of the encyclopedia — de.wikipedia.org.
Despite the German site being taken down, users could still access the German-language version throughout the weekend by going directly to its U.S. servers.
The German site was taken off-line briefly in 2006, after the parents of a dead hacker tried to prevent the site from linking to material that contained the hacker’s full name. A Berlin court rejected their lawsuit.