Ancient Web: Stefanie Wiele's Homepage Preserved a World Championship in Shorthand

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

There are personal websites about bands, video games, cars, and pets. Stefanie Wiele built one around competitive stenography, which is a useful reminder that the old Web gave every serious hobby exactly as much room as its owner was willing to type.

Visit Stefanie Wiele's stenography site

The German-language site collects material about Stenografie—shorthand—along with text processing, typing competitions, training material, and Wiele's experiences in organized international competition.

Its most historically interesting section concerns the 43rd Intersteno Congress, held in Hanover from July 28 through August 3, 2001.

Contemporary material from Wiele's stenography association records that she and Jochen Schönfeld produced what the organization described as the greatest competition success in its history, bringing world-championship honors to Oldenburg. The achievement was significant enough that they were received at city hall by the mayor.

The association specifically directed readers to Wiele's website for her firsthand account, photographs, a radio interview, and the mayor's speech.

That is exactly the sort of material personal websites were good at preserving.

A sport most people forgot was a sport

Competitive shorthand and text entry have a long history built around speed and accuracy. Intersteno traces international competitions back well before personal computers, through eras of handwritten shorthand, typewriters, electronic word processing, and modern keyboarding.

Wiele's site sits in the middle of that transition.

The pages are useful not merely because they explain shorthand systems but because they document the community around them: clubs, congresses, practice, records, competition results, and the pride surrounding a skill that became increasingly invisible as office technology changed.

The site also has a wonderfully old-Web quality in 2026. Search discussions still point beginners toward it when somebody finds a mysterious page of German shorthand and asks what the symbols mean. A personal reference page created by a world-class practitioner continues answering questions years after most people stopped encountering shorthand in ordinary life.

That is preservation through usefulness.

The office world replaced shorthand pads with laptops.

Wiele kept the strokes online.

Explore Stefanie Wiele's shorthand and typing pages

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.