Norwegian Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The logo for the Nynorsk Wikipedia.

The logo for the Bokmål Wikipedia.

There are two Norwegian language editions of Wikipedia: one for the more common Bokmål written standards of the language, and a second site for articles written in Nynorsk. The first site launched on November 26, 2001, and originally allowed articles to be written in any written Norwegian standard. A Nynorsk-specific Wikipedia was launched on July 31, 2004 and grew quickly. Following a vote in 2005, the main Norwegian site became Bokmål/Riksmål-only. By November 2006, the Bokmål/Riksmål edition had over 85,000 articles and the Nynorsk site has over 18,000 articles. In February 2006, it became the thirteenth Wikipedia to have more than 50,000 articles. However, in April 2006, Finnish Wikipedia passed it, and so it returned again 14th Wikipedia.

Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish are mutually intelligible languages and can be understood by most speakers of each. The sites collaborate with the other Scandinavian Wikipedias through the Skanwiki section of Wikimedia's Meta-Wiki site. One effect of this combined effort is the sharing of featured articles between the different Wikipedias.

Despite the fact that the ISO 639 two-letter code for Bokmål is nb, the Bokmål Wikipedia continues to be hosted at no.wikipedia.org. The Nynorsk code is nn, and the Nynorsk Wikipedia is hosted at nn.wikipedia.org.