Users who visited www.wikipedia.de from Saturday to Monday were greeted with a legal notice stating that the website will be unavailable for around four weeks due to a complaint from left-wing politician Lutz Heilmann.

"The German Wikipedia must not allow linking its domain wikipedia.de to the website wikipedia.org, as long as the German language version of wikipedia.org makes certain statements," the statement said.

Mr Heilmann took legal action over a Wikipedia entry that claimed he had not finished his university degree and that he had been involved in a pornography business venture.

The entry also repeated controversial information about Mr Heilmann, an openly gay MP who was once a member of East Germany's feared secret police, the Stasi.

Mr Heilmann pressed charges against Wikimedia Deutschland, the German arm of Wikimedia, and also against three people who had made changes to content on the page, Korean-based citizen journalist site OhMyNews reported.

But the attempt to suppress the profile backfired — as Wikipedia's servers are located in the US, both the German and English versions of the page remained available.

Significant attention across the blogosphere substantially increased traffic to the page and brought the allegations to the attention of both grassroots and mainstream media.

Heilmann later dropped legal proceedings against Wikimedia Deutschland, saying he regretted inconveniencing thousands of German Wikipedia users who had nothing to do with his profile.

Access appeared to have been restored to the www.wikipedia.de site this morning.

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