27 December 2009: German Wikipedia reaches one million articles

One million!

German is the second Wikipedia after English to reach one million articles, and that's even in spite of a fairly silly deletionist policy that causes characters like Anakin Skywalker to be relegated to a few paragraphs on a massive page that attempts to list all the characters in Star Wars.

Ah, but that's just the way the German Wikipedia treats fantasy characters, you say? If that's so then why does Wolverine have his own page? Or Merlin, or Grendel? Shouldn't those be "figures from X-men", "figures from Arthurian mythology" and "Figures from Beowulf"? No, it's a silly policy when one has to hunt down pages to all fit in a single gigantic article like that when other Wikipedias give these characters their own pages and thus don't have to worry about who belongs where. Either the character is notable and gets its own page, or not.

Nevertheless, congratulations on the one million. Up next will certainly be French (now at 893,000).