The German Wikipedia () is the German-language edition of Wikipedia, a free and publicly editable online encyclopedia. Founded on March 16, 2001, it is the second-oldest Wikipedia (after the English Wikipedia), and with articles, at present () the -largest edition of Wikipedia by number of articles, behind English Wikipedia and the mostly bot-generated Cebuano Wikipedia. It has the second-largest number of edits behind the English Wikipedia and over 260,000 disambiguation pages. On November 7, 2011, it became the second edition of Wikipedia, after the English edition, to exceed 100 million page edits. The German Wikipedia is criticized because of several ongoing political manipulations by paid editing who face a small and overwhelmed number of administrators. Early history The German edition of Wikipedia was the first non-English Wikipedia subdomain, and was originally named . Its creation was announced by Jimmy Wales on 16 March 2001. One of the earliest snapshots of the home page, dated 21 March 2001 (revision #9), can be seen at the Wayback Machine site. Aside from the home page, creation of articles in the German Wikipedia started as early as April 2001, apparently with translations of Nupedia articles. The earliest article still available on Wikipedia's site is apparently Polymerase-Kettenreaktion, dated May 2001. Andrew Lih wrote that the hacker culture in Germany and the verein concept solidified the German Wikipedia's culture. The geography of Europe facilitated face-to-face meetups among German Wikipedians. Growth, coverage and popularity On 27 December 2009, the German Wikipedia edition exceeded 1,000,000 articles, becoming the first edition after the English-language Wikipedia to do so. The millionth article was Ernie Wasson. In November 2008, 90% of the edition's articles had more than 512 bytes, 49% had more than 2 kilobytes, and the average article size was 3,476 bytes. In the middle of 2009, this edition had nearly 250,000 biographies and in December 2006 more than 48,500 disambiguations. Compared to the English Wikipedia, the German edition tends to be more selective in its coverage, often rejecting small stubs, articles about individual fictional characters and similar materials. Instead, there is usually one article about all the characters from a specific fictional setting, usually only when the setting is considered important enough (for example, all characters from Star Wars are listed in a single article). A dedicated article about a single fictional entity generally exists only if the character in question has a very significant impact on popular culture