Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-02-26/Interwiki report

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Report from the Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia

By Jon Harald Søby, 20 February 2007

Status and community news

On Saturday, 24 February 2007, the Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia passed the 100,000 article milestone. Of these, 100 (approximately one in 1,000) are considered utmerkede artikler (the Bokmål equivalent of featured articles), and 278 (approximately one in 357) are considered anbefalte artikler (the Bokmål equivalent of good articles).^[1] There are also six utmerkede lister (featured lists). There is no equivalent to the featured images. The 100,000th article was Ordulf av Sachsen (Ordulf, Duke of Saxony).

The latest additions to the list of utmerkede artikler are Niels Henrik Abel (Niels Henrik Abel) and Matematikkens historie (History of mathematics).^[2] The latest additions to the list of anbefalte artikler are Giuseppe Garibaldi (Giuseppe Garibaldi) and Moderne krigføring (Modern warfare).^[3]

The Bokmål Wikipedia currently has 64 administrators and around 38,000 registered users; that is, 590 users per administrator (compare to English, which has 3,229 users per administrator).^[4] There are five bureaucrats, and no checkusers or oversighters. There is no Arbitration Committee, and no current plans of forming one.

A brief history

The Norwegian Wikipedia (more about transition from Norwegian to Norwegian (Bokmål) below) was the first Scandinavian language Wikipedia to be opened, on 26 November 2001. It had some activity in the spring of 2002, but then there was no regular activity until the summer of 2003, when a group of students revived it. At this point, the Norwegian Wikipedia allowed for articles to be written in both written Norwegian standards, Bokmål and Nynorsk. The conventions of the time was that an article should keep the standard it had been written in, and not converted from one standard to another. This led to much debate, and on 31 July 2004, the Nynorsk Wikipedia (http://nn.wikipedia.org/) was created. The Norwegian Wikipedia would still allow for articles to be written in both standards, however, until a decision was finally made in the spring of 2005, when it was decided that the Wikipedia would be in Bokmål only. The Bokmål Wikipedia continues to be hosted on http://no.wikipedia.org/, even though the ISO 639-2 code for Bokmål is nb.^[5]

Skanwiki

Since March 2005, the Bokmål Wikipedia has featured featured articles from other Scandinavian language Wikipedias on its main page, as part of the "Skanwiki" cooperation with the Nynorsk and Danish Wikipedias (see related story). The Swedish Wikipedia, the largest Scandinavian-language Wikipedia, is not part of "Skanwiki", but Swedish featured articles are still featured on the other languages' main pages. Since May of 2006, the Bokmål Wikipedia has only showed one of the other languages' articles daily, to reduce the size of the main page: a Nynorsk article is featured on Monday, Thursday and Sunday; a Danish article on Tuesday and Friday; and a Swedish article on Wednesday and Saturday. Articles from other North Germanic Wikipedias, such as the Icelandic and Faroese Wikipedias, are featured on occasional Sundays.

Image policy

The image policy on the Bokmål Wikipedia has become more strict recently, and now only allows for images from Commons. Local uploads are still possible, but are strongly discouraged, as there should be no need for uploading locally.^[6]

Media

The media in Norway has been using both the English and the Bokmål Wikipedia quite a bit; the Nynorsk one is more rarely referred to in media. All three of Norway's largest newspapers use Wikipedia as a source for infoboxes and other background information, and all have featured stories about Wikipedia. Local papers and business papers also often use Wikipedia as a background source for their articles, and many have featured stories about Wikipedia as well.

Wikipedia-stafetten

Since November 2006, the Bokmål Wikipedia has had a coöperation with the online magazine Vox Publica, called "Wikipedia-stafetten" ("the Wikipedia relay race"). The project is about scholars and scientists contributing articles to Wikipedia, then challenge other scholars to do the same. The project has only been a moderate success, with four people having contributed. The articles written are Offentlighet (Public sphere), Offentlig rom (Public space), Aud Richter (Aud Richter) and Drammensbiblioteket (Drammen library).^[7]