Norwegian Wikipedia

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The logo for the Norwegian Wikipedia published in Bokmål and Riksmål.

The logo for the Nynorsk Wikipedia.

There are two Norwegian language editions of Wikipedia: one for articles written in Bokmål and Riksmål, and one for articles written in Nynorsk. The first site, the original Norwegian Wikipedia, 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 February 2007, the Bokmål/Riksmål edition had over 100,000 articles and the Nynorsk site has over 20,000 articles. In February 2006, it became the thirteenth Wikipedia to have more than 50,000 articles, and one year later it was the fourteenth to reach 100,000. However, after the Finnish Wikipedia surpassed it in April 2006 it is once again the 14th largest Wikipedia by article count [1].

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 and Riksmål Norwegian Wikipedia continues to be hosted at no.wikipedia.org, as it is not only Bokmål, and because the no code is far better known. The Nynorsk code is nn, and the Nynorsk Wikipedia is hosted at nn.wikipedia.org.