German Wikipedia back online after dispute

Mon Nov 17, 2008 12:09 PM EST

FRANKFURT — 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.