Wikimedia Deutschland · Page checks
| Severity | High | Medium | Low |
|---|---|---|---|
| Found | 0 | 4 | 0 |
| Fixed | 0 | 0 | 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):
- 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):
-
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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-termsare 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.
Suggested fixes, pending operator approval
- Create a claim on
wmde2026jahresberichtfor the three-million-article milestone and cite it as[@wmde2026jahresbericht:dewiki-three-million]. - Reorder the GLAM paragraph so the 2008 Bundesarchiv donation precedes the 2010 British Museum project, or drop "an early result".
- Rewrite the supporter-count paragraph to present both readings - two counts of people, or payments against people - and state that the labelling cannot be resolved from the published graphic. This is closer to what /meta/values requires when a question cannot be settled.
- Add the €6.16 million WMF project funding to the Finances section and qualify the corresponding sentence in "Concentration of a shared resource".
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.