Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-08-21/Interwiki report

Status and community news
As of August 21, the Swedish language Wikipedia has approximately 179,700 articles. Of these, 92 articles (about 1 in 1900) are considered Utmärkta artiklar, the Swedish Wikipedia equivalent of featured articles. In addition, 82 articles are considered to be Läsvärda artiklar, the equivalent to Good articles.

The last three "featured" articles are Herrens motståndsarmé (Lord's Resistance Army), Propaganda and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Swedish Wikipedia has 20,279 registered users, including 59 administrators (0.29 %). The relatively large number of administrators can be compared with English Wikipedia (0.05 %), German (0.08 %), Polish (0.15 %), Chinese (0.07 %) or Italian (0.06 %). Another difference with other major Wikipedias is that the articles are much shorter (link); less than half of the average article in English Wikipedia.

Considering that the Swedish language only has around 9 million native speakers it may be surprising that the Swedish Wikipedia is still one of the largest Wikipedias by the number of articles. It was long the fifth largest Wikipedia, but is now the eighth, having been overtaken by the Dutch earlier this year. It is still larger than the Portuguese or Spanish Wikipedias, although the lead over the Portuguese Wikipedia has decreased rapidly during 2006.

As far as community building goes, a large number of informal meetings have taken place in cafes in and around Stockholm, Linköping and Lund, where Wikipedia users have met to discuss Wikipedia matters. Calls for a more formal structure to arrange meetings and to collect donations have been unsuccessful.

Media coverage
Wikipedia is regularly mentioned in the Swedish media. In March, the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet wrote (link) that the Swedish Wikipedia claimed that Prince Gustav Adolf, deceased 1947, was sympathetic to Nazi Germany. The matter also included a photo of the prince donating money to a German charity and one Wikipedia contributor claiming that this showed the prince having strong sympathy for the Nazis. This sparked a controversy about the truth of the matter and how this should be presented.

In March the daily Svenska Dagbladet compared (www.svd.se) the Swedish Wikipedia with the subscription-only Nationalencyklopedin and the wikistyle Susning.nu. Although the Nationalencyklopedin was considered the overall best, the Swedish Wikipedia was praised for quick updates and its coverage of popular culture. The journalist also created two articles about fictional authors; these were nominated for deletion within hours. The journalist also changed correct information to incorrect (diff); this was not detected until the newspaper article was published weeks later. This can serve as a reminder of how easy it can be to add false information: administrators can easily revert simple vandalism and spamming but preventing more advanced vandalism is more difficult.

Temporaral administratorships
Since March 2006, administrator status on the Swedish Wikipedia is only temporaral. Administrators are reelected once a year. As far as it is known, only Metawiki uses anything similar. The reasons behind this is that the Swedish Wikipedia does not have an arbitration committee and that attempts to create one have stalled. Also of concern was a growing number of administrators that either were not very active or had left the project.

Although it may be too early to evaluate the reform yet, the most obvious effect it has had is giving administrators the opportunity to voluntarily step down. Nine administrators have either stepped down or did not reply to nominations for reelection. Hopefully, the reform will stress the importance of administrators following policy. On the other hand, it would be unfortunate if administrators were afraid of doing anything that would upset people.

Other items of interest
The Swedish Wikipedia does not allow fair use images except for logos or coats of arms. A discussion to go even further and not allow fair use images at all was started in July. Although the request did not receive majority support, it showed that a considerable minority are in favour of removing all fair use images.

There is a weekly competition, Veckans tävling, where contributors can focus on a task that needs to be attended to, such as categorizing articles, expanding stub articles, spell checking and so on. One user is judge and awards points and at the end of the week one user is then awarded first prize: eternal glory and a medal to put on his or her user page. The competition has become quite popular and it is a fun way of doing some necessary chores.