Susning.nu (in English literally meaning "") was a

Swedish language Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic languages, North Germanic language from the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family, spoken predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, making it the G ...

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

website created by Lars Aronsson (also the founder of

Project Runeberg Project Runeberg () is a digital cultural archive initiative that publishes free electronic versions of books significant to the culture and history of the Nordic countries. Patterned after Project Gutenberg, it was founded by Lars Aronsson and ...

) in 2001 and active until 2009. In its first three years, the website ran as an open wiki that anyone could edit. Susning did not have a pronounced ambition and could be compared in scope to Everything2; Aronsson's stated original aim for Susning was "to make it into whatever the users want it to be". As such, Susning was an

encyclopedia An encyclopedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, in a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into article (publishing), articles or entries that are arranged Alp ...

, a

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, and a discussion forum about any concept of interest to its users. Because of this, Susning grew and became

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

's biggest and the world's next biggest wiki. At its peak in April 2004, Susning had over 60,000 articles on various topics, which was more than any other Swedish wiki at that time. During its first few years, it was in direct competition with the

Swedish Wikipedia The Swedish Wikipedia () is the Swedish language, Swedish-language edition of Wikipedia, started in 2001. A free content online encyclopedia, it is the largest reference work in Swedish history, while consistently ranked as the most visited or on ...

. However, because of the website's popularity and open nature, Susning was highly affected by

vandals The Vandals were a Germanic people who were first reported in the written records as inhabitants of what is now Poland, during the period of the Roman Empire. Much later, in the fifth century, a group of Vandals led by kings established Vand ...

, eventually leading to the complete shutdown of the project. In attempt at preventing vandalism, many efforts were made by Susning's founder Lars Aronsson, which were mostly unsuccessful. Users who regularly edited at Susning were called "susare".

History

Susning.nu was started on August 31, 2001, by Lars Aronsson and functioned as part of his personal website. It changed to Susning.nu on September 29, and was released on October 1. During October that year, Susning.nu was indexed by the bigger

web search engine A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

s, and the article collection firmly increased. In one year, Susning.nu grew with 10,000 articles, and more features were added. Among them were link

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

for all pages, and date searching which automatically generated dates and search links in several languages. The first edit war broke out on July 31, 2002. Susning used a heavily modified version of UseModWiki as its wiki engine. Its domain name , which belongs to the island of

Niue Niue is a self-governing island country in free association with New Zealand. It is situated in the South Pacific Ocean and is part of Polynesia, and predominantly inhabited by Polynesians. One of the world's largest coral islands, Niue is c ...

in Oceania but which is sold primarily to foreigners, was chosen as a

domain hack A domain hack is a domain name that suggests a word, phrase, or name when concatenating two or more adjacent levels of that domain. For example, and , using the domains ''.bot'' and ''.le'', suggest the words ''robot'' and ''example'' respective ...

, because ''nu'' means " now" in Swedish (as well as Danish and Dutch). "''Skaffa dig en susning.nu''" was the

slogan A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a clan or a political, commercial, religious, or other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose, with the goal of persuading members of the public or a more defined target group ...

of Susning and translates to "''Get a clue.now''". (The standard top level domain for

is .)

Issues with vandalism

A significant difference from the

was that Susning did not have any voluntary administrators who could assist in blocking other users; the only person who could do that on Susning was Lars Aronsson. As Susning grew, the issue with

vandalism Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property. The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The t ...

became bigger. In December 2003, Susning was affected by a vandal who had automatized their activity through a script. In just a few minutes, thousands of articles were deleted. Several users were forced to spend hours restoring them. The issues increased even further with vandals who added

pornographic Pornography (colloquially called porn or porno) is sexually suggestive material, such as a picture, video, text, or audio, intended for sexual arousal. Made for consumption by adults, pornographic depictions have evolved from cave paintings ...

images and made the site inaccessible. The issues with vandalism were practically going on daily. To aid removal and discovery of vandalism, a "

karma Karma (, from , ; ) is an ancient Indian concept that refers to an action, work, or deed, and its effect or consequences. In Indian religions, the term more specifically refers to a principle of cause and effect, often descriptively called ...

system" was added on February 22, 2004. The system derailed fairly soon, as the karma only could decrease. Because of this, even the most established "susare" were affected by bad karma. The karma system was shut down on March 25, 2004. As a last attempt at preventing vandalism, the ability to see images was shut down entirely on April 5, 2004. However, a couple of days later it was possible to add images from certain chosen

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

s. Due to a bug in the system, there were ways to evade this, which the vandals utilised. The bug was fixed on April 15, 2004, but a few minutes later that day, all editing on Susning.nu was shut down. Aronsson announced that the editing abilities would be shut down until a solution to the vandalism issues had been found, and that a

password A password, sometimes called a passcode, is secret data, typically a string of characters, usually used to confirm a user's identity. Traditionally, passwords were expected to be memorized, but the large number of password-protected services t ...

system would be imposed.

Demise and closure

After the imposing of the password lock, Susning became a significantly more inactive project, and a dozen users made almost all edits. In March 2004, before the password system was imposed, articles were saved approximately 36,000 times; by May, this had been reduced to 1,600 times. On May 11, 2004, editing on Susning.nu was temporarily opened for non-logged-in users, but after just 18 hours, vandalism had once again become such a big problem that non-logged-in editing was once again shut down. In March 2006, editing by non-logged-in users was opened on Sunday afternoons between 12:00–16:00. A year later, editing between 06:00–07:00 each day was enabled as well. Overall, this worked well but with a bit of vandalism. In mid-2008, the website was affected by a persistent spammer who used proxy servers to spam different articles with English advertisement links. In April 2009, this forced Aronsson to remove the daily editing abilities between 06:00–07:00. The editing abilities during Sunday afternoons, however, continued to be open despite recurring spam attacks. By this time, very few users were still creating and editing articles on the website, which was shut down entirely in mid-August 2009; no reason for this was ever announced.

Reception

Opinions

One opinion aired was that Susning's status as a one-man project on the technical side was a big obstacle. Some argued that shared responsibility of the site would likely have meant a higher rate of innovation, greater predictability and better communication between technicians and "susare". Lars Aronsson clarified that he saw Susning.nu as his own project and that he was not interested in letting others control it. After imposing editing on Sunday afternoons only, Aronsson himself used Susning mostly as a

logbook A logbook (or log book) is a record used to record states, events, or conditions applicable to complex machines or the personnel who operate them. Logbooks are commonly associated with the operation of aircraft, nuclear plants, particle accelera ...

where he saved links regarding, for example,

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and

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a free content, free Online content, online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and La ...

Unlike its main competitor, the Swedish Wikipedia, Susning.nu placed

advertisements Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to present a product or service in terms of utility, advantages, and qualities of interest to consumers. It is typically us ...

on some of its articles. It also had no

license agreement A license (American English) or licence (Commonwealth English) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another part ...

, which meant that the contributions remained

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

ed by their submitters (the right to modify was said to be implicit in the site's function). This in turn meant that third parties, such as Wikipedia editors, could not legally use Susning.nu materials contributed by others without permission. It also meant that Susning.nu depended solely on Lars Aronsson's willingness to continue the project.

References

External links

Susning.nu
on the

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web founded by Internet Archive, an American nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California. Launched for public access in 2001, the service allows users to go "back in ...

Swedish online encyclopedias Defunct websites Internet properties established in 2001 Internet properties disestablished in 2009 Online dictionaries Wiki communities 2001 establishments in Sweden 2009 disestablishments in Sweden