Swedish Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Swedish Wikipedia is the Swedish edition of Wikipedia. It was the third edition of Wikipedia, started in May 2001 alongside German Wikipedia, after English Wikipedia and Catalan Wikipedia. It is the eight-largest Wikipedia by article-count (after the English, German, French, Dutch, Japanese, Polish and Italian editions) reaching 180,000 articles on August 24, 2006. However, articles on Swedish are much shorter compared to those of other large Wikipedias. (Wikipedia statistics, Bytes per Article)

Since Swedish is largely mutually intelligible with Danish and Norwegian, administrators of the site collaborate with those at the respective Wikipedias through the Skanwiki section of the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki site.

1 History
2 Organisation
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] History

Article count since July 22, 2003, up to December 2005.

Originally, Swedish Wikipedia rivalled susning.nu which was a wiki created by Lars Aronsson in 2001, based on the MediaWiki software, but with several modifications. susning.nu was by May 28, 2003 the world's second largest wiki. Due to several controversies involving the authority of the founder, objections to Aronsson's decision to allow advertisement on the site, and the lack of proper tools to fight vandalism, several prolific susning-writers switched over to Swedish Wikipedia in 2003-2004. In April 2004, susning.nu's editing features were closed down to all but a handful of users, which further increased the flow to Swedish Wikipedia. On January 14, 2005, the article count of Wikipedia surpassed the one of susning.nu.

Since March 2006, administratorship on the Swedish Wikipedia is only temporary. Administrators are reelected once a year. As far as it is known, only Meta-Wikipedia 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.

[edit] Organisation

The Swedish Wikipedia originally allowed fair use images citing American law. Partly because of uncertainty regarding the validity of American law in Sweden, and the validity of fair use in Sweden, it was during 2005 decided only to allow fair use in the case of logos and coats of arms.