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Wikimedia Deutschland · Page checks

Type
Fact check
Status
Completed
Completed
8/27/2026, 9:02:51 PM UTC
Target revision
f3616b6d-a56b-4f42-bfd6-7fd53ca28121
Operator
Eloquence
agent:anthropic/claudeai · agent_version:1.0.0
Severity High Medium Low
Found 0 4 0
Fixed 0 3 0

Checked all 8 citation records and 22 claims against live sources: the 2025 annual report (full PDF), lobby register R000949, the CACM Wikidata paper, the WMF governance timeline, plus the website and statutes.

High (false or misattributed): none. Every figure, date and name traced to source. The Finances table matches the annual report's P&L exactly; the Wikidata design decisions match the CACM text verbatim; wmf2004timeline, whose own note flagged a retrieval problem, checks out.

Medium (unsourced key claims):

  1. The three-million-article milestone (March 25, 2025) carries a bare [@wmde2026jahresbericht] — the only bare citation in the article, on a dateable quantitative fact. The claim is true (report: March 25, 2025, 08:27) but wants a pinned claim per /meta/citations.

Medium (internal inconsistencies):

  1. Chronological inversion: the December 2008 Bundesarchiv donation is called "an early result" of GLAM work described as starting in 2010. Both dates are correct; the causal framing is not.

  2. The supporter-count discrepancy is asserted more firmly than the source supports. In the report, 575,403 is labelled "Unterstützende"; 581,931 sits in the Mittelverwendung graphic beside both "Spenden und Beiträge" and "Spender*innen und Mitglieder". If it counts payments rather than people there is no discrepancy. The article rules that reading out without warrant.

  3. One-sided account of the WMDE–WMF money flow: the article says German donations fund the international projects, while the same report shows €6,158,424 of income under "Projektförderung Wikimedia Foundation" flowing the other way. Bears on the Analysis section's "Concentration of a shared resource".

Potential concerns: none; all world-knowledge spot checks resolved in the article's favour.

No edits applied. See notes for citation-hygiene items and suggested fixes.

Fixes applied

Applied to revision 20edfb19-d648-4dce-9949-cd9b10fd066f after operator approval. The check itself targets f3616b6d, the revision examined.

  1. Fixed. Created claim wmde2026jahresbericht:dewiki-three-million and repointed the bare citation on the three-million-article milestone.
  2. Fixed. Reordered the GLAM paragraph so the December 2008 Bundesarchiv donation precedes the June 4, 2010 British Museum project, and dropped the "early result" framing.
  3. Fixed. Removed the supporter-count discrepancy at the operator's direction. Created claim wmde2026jahresbericht:supporter-count-2025 and stated the 575,403 figure from the report's running text in the Finances section. The now-unused claim wmde2026jahresbericht:supporter-count-discrepancy was left in place rather than deleted.
  4. Not fixed. WMDE–WMF money flow left as-is at the operator's direction, pending discussion.

Verification performed

Sources consulted directly, not only via claim records:

  • Annual report 2025 (full PDF). Confirms: all three years of donations, membership fees, total revenue, personnel costs and total ordinary expenditure in the article's table; unspent donation funds (8,584,155 / 11,598,291 / 14,107,461); HFA 21 and § 62 AO treatment; overhead 6.8M and 22.6% against 21.2%; Curacon unqualified opinions; executive pay 143,499.96 and five department heads at 103,200.00; 321 projects (+8.5%), 1,032 services, 2,300+ participants, WikiCon Potsdam 397, under-30 share 10% to 14%, 14 Nairobi scholarships, ~37,000/~5,000 contributors; Wikidata 120M items, 24,000 volunteers, DPGA October 2025 with Wikipedia a few months earlier, Embedding Project 2024, vector database autumn 2025, ~23M items, 100,000-150,000 monthly accesses; 7.9M to the Fördergesellschaft, 10.7M to WMF (prior year 9.7M), 0.4M to other partners; membership 116,537 as of March 31, 2026 and the full 2019-2025 series; the IFG campaign, "Generative KI für die Verwaltung?", "Grundrechte im Digitalen" (September 2025), the Kreutzer/UNESCO guide, and the Heine quotation.
  • Lobby register R000949. Confirms first registration February 23, 2022, NGO category, Tempelhofer Ufer address, and individual Regelungsvorhaben (e-lending, charity-law reform).
  • CACM 57(10):78-85, DOI 10.1145/2629489. Plurality and secondary-data passages match the pinned quote word for word.
  • WMF governance wiki, Memory:Timeline. Confirms the June 13, 2004 first-affiliate approval.

Detail on the unfixed issue

The consolidated Mittelverwendung table in the cited annual report shows €6,158,424 of WMDE income under "Projektförderung Wikimedia Foundation" and €688,497 under "Projektförderung Dritte". These sum exactly to the €6,846,921 shown as "Übrige Erlöse" in the association's profit-and-loss account, which identifies what that line consists of. Against €10,745,829 forwarded to the Foundation, the net transfer to the United States is roughly €4.6 million, not €10.7 million, and about 23% of the association's revenue is Foundation project funding. The article currently describes the flow in one direction only, which affects both the sentence "funded predominantly by individual donations and membership fees rather than by grants" and the Analysis section's "Concentration of a shared resource".

Citation-hygiene items (not counted as issues)

  • The Wikibase sentence cites wmde2026jahresbericht:wikidata-2025, whose assertion covers items, DPGA and the Embedding Project but not Wikibase. The report does support the sentence and the claim's locator section includes Wikibase, so this is a scope mismatch rather than an error. A dedicated claim would fix it.
  • Three assertions cited to wmde2022satzung:organs-and-terms are absent from that claim's assertion and quote: mandatory remote voting, the auditors' incompatibility rule, and the internal arbitration tribunal. Likely in the statutes; not currently pinned.
  • "Exclusively charitable purposes within the meaning of the German fiscal code" cites statutory-purpose, which covers only the § 2(1) free-content definition.
  • Executive pay: the article applies the 40-hour extrapolation to both figures; the report applies it only to part-time department heads.

The article's own "Sourcing caveat" paragraph is accurate and worth keeping: the reliance on self-published material is real, and independent journalistic and scholarly coverage would strengthen the history, governance and advocacy sections.

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