Education Wolfgang Stock studied history and political science at the
University of Würzburg and the
University of Oxford. He earned a PhD with a thesis on the German European policy at the
University of Oxford He was the first West European person who arrived in Gdańsk after the imposition of martial law on 13 December 1981, leading a transport worth of relief supplies for families of Solidarity activist confined in detention camps. In 1985, the then communist part of Germany (
GDR) declared him a criminal person and denied him visas. Working with
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) as a
correspondent since 1988, he reported, in 1990, on the first free elections in Eastern Germany/
GDR. From 1991 on, he was political correspondent with the FAZ in Bonn. From 1996 to 1998 he was news editor of
Berliner Zeitung, from 1998 to 2001 political correspondent for
Focus in the federal capital, first
Bonn and then
Berlin. In 2000, he published the first biography of chancellor
Angela Merkel. From 2001 to 2003, he was political editor and a managing editor of Germany's leading Sunday paper
Welt am Sonntag. Stock was professor of Journalism and division head at the
Gustav Siewerth Academy from 2001 to 2009. In 2004 and 2005 he worked for two semesters as a visiting professor for professional journalism at the
University of Giessen. From 2006 to 2015 he holds lectureships in journalism at the
European University Viadrina,
Frankfurt (Oder). From 2015 to 2025 he was teaching at IST-Hochschule for Management, Duesseldorf. From 2003 to 2005 he worked for the media research institute Media Tenor. In October 2009 he lodged the only successful content complaint in the tenth term of the Rundfunkrat of the
WDR Broadcasting against a film of the journalist
Klaus Martens. The Film "Heilung unerwünscht" (undesirable healing) was about a neurodermatitis ointment . In May 2010, the Rundfunkrat of the WDR declared that the film violated the
journalistic fairness through a highly simplified and one-sided representation thus held stocks complaint.
Project Wiki-Watch In October 2010, Stock and the lawyer and professor founded the
Arbeitsstelle Wiki-Watch im "Studien- und Forschungsschwerpunkt Medienrecht" der Juristischen Fakultät der Europa-Universität Viadrina (in short project
Wiki-Watch) as Division of the media-law branch of the
Viadrina European University, Germany which watches Wikipedia critically. Wiki-Watch conducted and published a survey of administrators of German Wikipedia and blogs regularly about German Wikipedia problems. Wiki-Watch's site wiki-watch.org provides statistic insights on Wikipedia and evaluates automatically the formal
reliability of Wikipedia articles in English and German by using statistical edit data and by collaborating with
WikiTrust. An article published in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung July 2011 and repeated in other media described an alleged
conflict of interest between Stocks work for Wiki-Watch and for a pharmaceutical company which was a client of his agency Convincet. Weberling and Stock announced legal action against the newspaper, whereupon the online-articles have been taken offline. Stocks last Wikipedia edits in the area of pharmaceuticals and health issues date two years earlier in spring 2009 and one year before founding Wiki-Watch in late 2010. By his own admission his edits derived from personal interest and concernment and were not paid by anybody. Only later, from summer 2009 on he had worked as a communications consultant for the pharmaceutical company. In a
formal reply in
Der Spiegel, Stock unchallenged claimed that he had made his edits of entries related to a pharmaceutical company before beginning his consulting work for this company. The European University Viadrina called the allegations against him "demonstrably false".
Career in Christian education From 1998 to 2012 he was honorary director of a Christian
day care in
Woltersdorf. In 2016 he was elected Secretary General of the German national umbrella organisation of free Evangelical schools, VEBS. == Decorations and community activities ==