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Susning.nu (literally meaning "") was a
Swedish language Swedish ( ) is a North Germanic language spoken predominantly in Sweden and in parts of Finland. It has at least 10 million native speakers, the fourth most spoken Germanic language and the first among any other of its type in the Nordic countr ...
wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
website created by
Lars Aronsson Lars Erik Aronsson (born 19 March 1966 in Örebro, Sweden) is a Swedish programmer and consultant, and the founder of two Swedish web sites: the free electronic book archive Project Runeberg and the Swedish language wiki Susning.nu.
(also the founder of
Project Runeberg Project Runeberg ( sv, Projekt Runeberg) is a digital cultural archive initiative that publishes free electronic versions of books significant to the culture and history of the Nordic countries. Patterned after Project Gutenberg, it was founded ...
) in 2001 and active until 2009. In its first three years, Susning.nu ran as an open wiki that anyone could edit. Susning did not have a pronounced ambition and could be compared in scope to
Everything2 Everything2 (styled Everything2 or E2 for short) is a collaborative Web-based community consisting of a database of interlinked user-submitted written material. E2 is moderated for quality, but has no formal policy on subject matter. Writing on ...
; Aronsson's stated original aim for Susning was "to make it into whatever the users want it to be". As such, Susning was an
encyclopedia An encyclopedia (American English) or encyclopædia (British English) is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge either general or special to a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into articles ...
, a
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
, and a discussion forum about any concept of interest to its users. Because of this, Susning grew and became
Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
's biggest and the world's next biggest wiki. At its peak in April 2004, Susning had over 60,000 articles on various topics, which was more than any other Swedish wiki at that time. During its first few years, it was in direct competition with the
Swedish Wikipedia The Swedish Wikipedia ( sv, Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia) is the Swedish-language edition of Wikipedia and was started on the 23 of May 2001. It is currently the largest Wikipedia by article count with its current articles, it has a ''Wikipedia ...
. However, because of the website's popularity and open nature, Susning was highly affected by
vandals The Vandals were a Germanic peoples, Germanic people who first inhabited what is now southern Poland. They established Vandal Kingdom, Vandal kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean islands, and North Africa in the fifth century. The ...
, eventually leading to the complete shutdown of the project. In attempt at preventing vandalism, many efforts were made by Susning's founder Lars Aronsson, which were mostly unsuccessful. Users who regularly edited at Susning were called "susare".


History

Susning.nu was started on August 31, 2001, by
Lars Aronsson Lars Erik Aronsson (born 19 March 1966 in Örebro, Sweden) is a Swedish programmer and consultant, and the founder of two Swedish web sites: the free electronic book archive Project Runeberg and the Swedish language wiki Susning.nu.
and functioned as part of his personal website. It changed to Susning.nu on September 29, and was released on October 1. During October that year, Susning.nu was indexed by the bigger web search engines, and the article collection firmly increased. In one year, Susning.nu grew with 10,000 articles, and more features were added. Among them were link
statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...
for all pages, and date searching which automatically generated dates and search links in several languages. The first edit war broke out on July 31, 2002. Susning used a heavily modified version of
UseModWiki UseModWiki is a wiki software written in Perl and licensed under the GNU General Public License. Pages in UseModWiki are stored in ordinary files, not in a relational database. Wikipedias in English and many other languages were powered by Use ...
as its
wiki engine Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application), is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application ...
. Its domain name , which belongs to the island of Niue in Oceania but which is sold primarily to foreigners, was chosen as a domain hack, because ''nu'' means " now" in Swedish (as well as
Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish ance ...
and Dutch). "''Skaffa dig en susning.nu''" was the
slogan A slogan is a memorable motto or phrase used in a clan, political slogan, political, Advertising slogan, commercial, religious, and other context as a repetitive expression of an idea or purpose, with the goal of persuading members of the publi ...
of Susning and translates to "''Get a clue.now''". (The standard top level domain for
Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
is .)


Issues with vandalism

A significant difference from the
Swedish Wikipedia The Swedish Wikipedia ( sv, Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia) is the Swedish-language edition of Wikipedia and was started on the 23 of May 2001. It is currently the largest Wikipedia by article count with its current articles, it has a ''Wikipedia ...
was that Susning did not have any voluntary administrators who could assist in blocking other users; the only person who could do that on Susning was Lars Aronsson. As Susning grew, the issue with vandalism became bigger. In December 2003, Susning was affected by a vandal who had automatized their activity through a
script Script may refer to: Writing systems * Script, a distinctive writing system, based on a repertoire of specific elements or symbols, or that repertoire * Script (styles of handwriting) ** Script typeface, a typeface with characteristics of handw ...
. In just a few minutes, thousands of articles were deleted. Several users were forced to spend hours restoring them. The issues increased even further with vandals who added pornographic images and made the site inaccessible. The issues with vandalism were practically going on daily. To aid removal and discovery of vandalism, a " karma system" was added on February 22, 2004. The system derailed fairly soon, as the karma only could decrease. Because of this, even the most established "susare" were affected by bad karma. The karma system was shut down on March 25, 2004. As a last attempt at preventing vandalism, the ability to see images was shut down entirely on April 5, 2004. However, a couple of days later it was possible to add images from certain chosen domain names. Due to a bug in the system, there were ways to evade this, which the vandals utilised. The bug was fixed on April 15, 2004, but a few minutes later that day, all editing on Susning.nu was shut down. Aronsson announced that the editing abilities would be shut down until a solution to the vandalism issues had been found, and that a password system would be imposed. No details were given for the time being. A couple dozen of logged in "susare" had edited a fairly huge number of articles since the password lock was imposed.


Demise and closure

After the imposing of the password lock, Susning became a more inactive project, and a dozen users made almost all edits. In March 2004, before the password system was imposed, articles were saved approximately 36,000 times; by May, this had been reduced to 1,600 times. On May 11, 2004, editing on Susning.nu was temporarily opened for non-logged in users, but after just 18 hours, vandalism once again became such a big problem that non-logged in editing was once again shut down. In March 2006, editing by non-logged in users was opened on Sunday afternoons between 12:00–16:00. A year later, editing between 06:00–07:00 each day was enabled as well. Overall, this worked well but with a bit of vandalism. In mid-2008, the website was affected by a persistent spammer who used proxy servers to spam different articles with English advertisement links. In April 2009, this forced Aronsson to remove the daily editing abilities between 06:00–07:00. The editing abilities during Sunday afternoons, however, continued to be open despite recurring spam attacks. By this time, very few users were still creating and editing articles on the website, which was shut down entirely in mid-August 2009; no reason for this was ever announced.


Reception


Opinions

An aired opinion was that Susning's status as a one-man project on the technical side was a big aberration. Some meant that divided responsibility of the site probably would have meant increased innovation tact, bigger predictability and better communication between technicians and "susare". Lars Aronsson clarified that he saw Susning.nu as his own project and that he was not interested in letting others control it. After imposing editing on Sunday afternoons only, Aronsson himself used Susning mostly as a
logbook A logbook (or log book) is a record used to record states, events, or conditions applicable to complex machines or the personnel who operate them. Logbooks are commonly associated with the operation of aircraft, nuclear plants, particle accelera ...
where he saved links regarding, for example, Google and Wikipedia.


Advertisement

Unlike its main competitor, the Swedish Wikipedia, Susning.nu placed advertisements on some of its articles. It also had no
license agreement A license (or licence) is an official permission or permit to do, use, or own something (as well as the document of that permission or permit). A license is granted by a party (licensor) to another party (licensee) as an element of an agreeme ...
, which meant that the contributions remained copyrighted by their submitters (the right to modify was said to be implicit in the site's function). This in turn meant that third parties, such as
Wikipedia editors The Wikipedia community, collectively known colloquially as Wikipedians, is an informal community that volunteers to create and maintain Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Since August 2012, the word "Wikipedian" has been an '' Oxford Diction ...
, could not legally use Susning.nu materials contributed by others without permission. It also meant that Susning.nu depended solely on Lars Aronsson's willingness to continue the project.


See also

*
Enciclopedia Libre Enciclopedia (in Spanish and Italian), or enciclopédia (in Portuguese), means the English word encyclopedia. Enciclopedia may refer to: *'' Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana'' (1908-) *''Enciclopedia Italiana'' or ''Treccani'' ( ...
*
List of online encyclopedias This is a list of well-known online encyclopedias—i.e., encyclopedias accessible or formerly accessible on the Internet. The largest online encyclopedias are general reference works, though there are also many specialized ones. Some online ency ...


References


Further reading

* Lars Aronsson: ''Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website. Experience from susning.nu's first nine months in service.'' Presented on November 7, 2002, at the ELPUB 2002 conference in Karlovy Var

and printed in: João Álvaro Carvalho, Arved Hübler, Ana Alice Baptista (editors), Elpub 2002. Technology Interactions. Proceedings of the 6th International ICCC/IFIP Conference on Electronic Publishing held in
Karlovy Vary Karlovy Vary (; german: Karlsbad, formerly also spelled ''Carlsbad'' in English) is a spa town, spa city in the Karlovy Vary Region of the Czech Republic. It has about 46,000 inhabitants. It lies on the confluence of the rivers Ohře and Teplá. ...
, Czech Republic, 6–8 November 2002, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung Berlin, 2002, {{ISBN, 3-89700-357-0, pages 27–37
Online copy


External links


Susning.nu
on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine Swedish online encyclopedias Internet properties established in 2001 Internet properties disestablished in 2009 Online dictionaries Wiki communities 2001 establishments in Sweden 2009 disestablishments in Sweden