Swedish Wikipedia

The Swedish Wikipedia (Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia) is the Swedish-language edition of Wikipedia and was started on the 21 of May 2001. It is currently the largest Wikipedia by article count with its 0 current articles, it has a Wikipedia article depth of. A majority were generated by Lsjbot, a bot, 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


Wikipedia in English was founded 15 January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Soon, more language versions were discussed, including with foreign language speakers.

Jimmy Wales installed Swedish Wikipedia on sv.wikipedia.com 23 May 2001 as Wikipedia's 4th language version. All of Wikipedia was still in its early stage in terms of web development, translations, as well as establishing the online encyclopedia community. Jimmy Wales delegated the creation to two Swedes: initially in 2001 to Linus Tolke, a Swedish systems architect tasked with translating the prototype software, and subsequently in 2002 to Dan Koehl, previously creator of one of the first online encyclopedias in 1995, who concluded the translations and whom Jimmy Wales appointed as Swedish Wikipedia's first system operator.

The prototype "Phase I" UseModWiki software for sv.wikipedia.com was translated in May 2001 by Linus Tolke and the conclusive "Phase III" MediaWiki for sv.wikipedia.org in November 2002 by Dan Koehl. The "Phase III" PHP-engined MediaWiki Swedish interface premiered on sv.wikipedia.org 1 December 2002, where Swedish Wikipedia has remained ever since, becoming the foundation for subsequent, contemporary versions.

After initiating prototype translations and having started a few articles Linus Tolke left, while Dan Koehl translated the concluding software foundation and went on to pioneer the fundamental corpus of articles and categorisation. Besides editing, Dan Koehl set up the early organisational, maintenance and community functions, such as the Swedish Meta mainsite, Bybrunnen user forums, sabotage deterrence, 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 Jimmy Wales' direct personal supervision.

In the early 2000s, Swedish Wikipedia's prototype instantiation functioned as a small, foreign-franchised competitor to the independently Swedish UseModWiki Susning.nu created 1 October 2001 by Lars Aronsson, inspired by the English Wikipedia. However, the founder's introduction of advertisement on the website from 20 November 2002, led its contributors to gradually abondon it for Swedish Wikipedia. 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 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 bots 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.