The Swedish Wikipedia ( sv, Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia) is the

Swedish-language Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic language spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, the fourth most spoken Germanic language and the first among any other of its type in the Nordic countr ...

edition of Wikipedia and was started on the 23 of May 2001. It is currently the largest Wikipedia by article count with its current articles, it has a ''Wikipedia article depth'' of . A majority were generated by Lsjbot, a

bot Bot may refer to: Sciences Computing and technology * Chatbot, a computer program that converses in natural language * Internet bot, a software application that runs automated tasks (scripts) over the Internet **a Spambot, an internet bot des ...

, or software application. The administrators on the Swedish Wikipedia (currently ) are elected for a fixed-term period of one year and have to be re-elected after that time.

History

Swedish Wikipedia was launched by

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedi ...

on the 23 May 2001 as Wikipedia's 4th language version. The "Phase I"

UseModWiki UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by ...

software for ''sv.wikipedia.com'' was translated by Linus Tolke and the "Phase III" MediaWiki was translated by Dan Koehl together with Johan Dahlin and Max Walter. The latter, contemporary PHP-engined MediaWiki Swedish interface premiered on ''sv.wikipedia.org'' 1 December 2002, becoming the foundation for later updates. Dan Koehl was appointed Swedish Wikipedia's first "

sysop A sysop (; an abbreviation of system operator) is an administrator of a multi-user computer system, such as a bulletin board system (BBS) or an online service virtual community.Jansen, E. & James,V. (2002). NetLingo: the Internet dictionary. Netl ...

". He set up the early community features such as '' Bybrunnen'', maintenance functions such as sabotage deterrence, pioneered much of its fundamental corpus of articles, and called to the first ''Tinget''. This wiki " thing" of 24 November 2002 became the first instance akin to an arbitration committee on any Wikipedia language version, effectively making Swedish Wikipedia the first decentralised franchise while the rest of Wikipedia was still under Jim Wales' direct personal supervision. The first years, Swedish Wikipedia functioned as a small, foreign-franchised competitor to the independently Swedish UseModWiki

Susning.nu Susning.nu (literally meaning "") was a Swedish language wiki website created by Lars Aronsson (also the founder of Project Runeberg) in 2001 and active until 2009. In its first three years, Susning.nu ran as an open wiki that anyone could edit. ...

created by

Lars Aronsson Lars Erik Aronsson (born 19 March 1966 in Örebro, Sweden) is a Swedish programmer and consultant, and the founder of two Swedish web sites: the free electronic book archive Project Runeberg and the Swedish language wiki Susning.nu.

in 2001, inspired by the English Wikipedia. However, the founder's decision to allow

advertisement Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers. It is typically used to promote a ...

on the website from 20 November 2002 led Dan Koehl to switch over to Swedish Wikipedia, with several prolific contributors gradually following suit. Although Susning.nu became the world's second largest wiki 28 May 2003, in April 2004, its editing features were closed down to all but a handful of users, which further increased the flow to Swedish Wikipedia. On 14 January 2005, Wikipedia's article count surpassed that of Susning.nu. Susning.nu was shut down entirely in August 2009. In March 2006, the Swedish newspaper ''

Svenska Dagbladet ''Svenska Dagbladet'' (, "The Swedish Daily News"), abbreviated SvD, is a daily newspaper published in Stockholm, Sweden. History and profile The first issue of ''Svenska Dagbladet'' appeared on 18 December 1884. During the beginning of the ...

'' published a comparative evaluation of Swedish Wikipedia, Susning.nu and the online version of Nationalencyklopedin. The evaluation was done by giving a selection of articles to independent subject matter experts for grading. While Nationalencyklopedin came out on top with respect to factuality and neutrality, Swedish Wikipedia received a good overall grade and came out on top with respect to being up to date and having a broad coverage, also including popular culture subjects.

Massive deletions in robot-made articles

On 27 September 2012 it reached 500,000 articles. On 15 June 2013 it reached 1,000,000 articles and rose from 8th to 5th place. This is in large part due to a community project where

s were used in producing articles for all existing species of plants and animals. When finished, this project alone created more than a million articles, most short and sourced through available online databases on the subject. In 2014 about half of its articles were created by a single bot. During 2015 and 2016, Lsjbot wrote more than 1 million geographical articles, increasing the number of articles to nearly 3.8 million by November 2016 when it stopped. While this practice allowed the Swedish Wikipedia to become the second largest worldwide, quality suffered from a lack of sourcing, shallow articles, duplicates, and outdated information. Facing these problems, tide turned against the bots and article deletions started outpacing new creations. From the 2016 maximum of 3.8 million articles, the count to below 3.3 million articles in March 2021, and as of December 2021, the count dropped below 2.8 million articles. SvWikipedia.png, Swedish Wikipedia's increase after the implementation of advertisements on

21 Nov. 2002 SV WP Growth.png, Article count 2001 to 2013.

Gallery

Wikipedia-logo-v2-sv-500k.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 500,000 article logo (September 2012) Wikipedia-logo-vLLen-sv-1M.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 1,000,000 article logo (June 2013) Wikipedia-logo-v2-se-2-million.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 2,000,000 article logo (September 2015) Wikipedia-logo-v2-se-3-million.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 3,000,000 article logo (April 2016)

Topics

In 2019 the Swedish Wikipedia had 354,000 unique categories. The average article in this language version had 5 categories and ratio of unique categories to articles was 0.094. The categories with the largest number of articles in 2019 were ''Life'' (30%) and ''Geography'' (24%). In the Swedish Wikipedia, articles related to Geography and Life had the highest average quality. Content about Health was read more often and articles in the Events category had the highest average author interest.

Verifiability

In March 2020 the Swedish Wikipedia contained 20.1 million references, wherein 4.31% of them had a DOI and 0.72% of references contained an ISBN.

References

External links

*
Swedish Wikipedia
*
Swedish Wikipedia mobile version
{{Wikipedias in Germanic languages Swedish encyclopedias Wikipedias by language Wikipedias in Germanic languages Wikipedia Internet properties established in 2001 2001 establishments in the United States 2001 establishments in Sweden