Store norske leksikon, abbreviated SNL, is currently the second most comprehensive contemporary Norwegian language (bokmål) encyclopedia. The SNL was created in 1978 when the two publishing houses Aschehoug and Gyldendal merged their encyclopedias and created the company Kunnskapsforlaget. The name translates into English as "Great Norwegian encyclopedia". Up until 1978 the two publishing houses of Aschehoug and Gyldendal, Norway's two largest, had published Aschehougs konversasjonsleksikon and Gyldendals konversasjonsleksikon, respectively. The first editions of these came out in 1907–1913 (Aschehoug) and 1933–1934 (Gyldendal).
The slump in selling paperbased encyclopedias around the turn of the 21st century hit the Kunnskapsforlaget hard, but a fourth edition of the paperbased encyclopedia was finally secured by a grant of 10 million Norwegian kroner from the foundation Fritt Ord in 2003. The fourth edition consists of 16 volumes, a total of 12,000 pages and 280,000 entries.
On March 12, 2010 Store Norske Leksikon announced that from 1 July 2010 there will be no new editions of "Store Norske Leksikon", because of lackluster sales. The main reason behind this decision was stated to be because of Wikipedia. It was also announced that the articles will not be given to the Wikipedia Foundation, with chief-editor Petter Henriksen stating that: "It is important that the people behind the articles remain visible".[1]
SNL has been available online since 2000 and has several hundred thousand subscribers (private and institutional). The number of online articles is about 150,000. Since February 25, 2009, the online encyclopedia has been free, and users can add new articles and suggest changes to existing articles.[2] The source code will be released as open source. Kunnskapsforlaget is currently searching for 1,000 experts who can make sure that the user-generated content is accurate, and implement it in the quality-assured core that still will be maintained.