The Swedish Wikipedia ( sv, Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia) is the Swedish-language edition of

Wikipedia Wikipedia is a multilingual free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and using a wiki-based editing system. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read refer ...

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 article depth'' of . A majority were generated by

Lsjbot Lsjbot is an automated Wikipedia article-creating program, or Wikipedia bot, developed by Sverker Johansson for the Swedish Wikipedia. The bot primarily focuses on articles about living organisms and geographical entities (such as rivers, dams ...

, a bot, or software application. The

administrators Administrator or admin may refer to: Job roles Computing and internet * Database administrator, a person who is responsible for the environmental aspects of a database * Forum administrator, one who oversees discussions on an Internet forum * ...

on the Swedish Wikipedia (currently ) are elected for a fixed-term period of one year and have to be re-elected after that time.

History

Swedish Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales on the 23 May 2001 as Wikipedia's 4th language version. The "Phase I"

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 ...

software for ''sv.wikipedia.com'' was translated by

Linus Tolke Linus, a male given name, is the Latin form of the Greek name ''Linos''. It's a common given name in Sweden. The origin of the name is unknown although the name appears in antiquity both as a musician who taught Apollo and as a son of Apollo who di ...

and the "Phase III"

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sites define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWi ...

was translated by

Dan Koehl Dan Albert John Koehl (born 28 October 1959) is a French-Swedish zookeeper, elephant trainer, and stablemaster. An author of the ''Elephant Encyclopedia'', he has been described as "one of Europe's most renowned experts on elephants". Early yea ...

together with Johan Dahlin and Max Walter. The latter, contemporary

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group. ...

-engined MediaWiki Swedish interface premiered on ''sv.wikipedia.org'' 1 December 2002, becoming the foundation for later updates. Dan Koehl was appointed Swedish Wikipedia's first " sysop". He set up the early community features such as '' Bybrunnen'', maintenance functions such as sabotage deterrence, pioneered much of its fundamental corpus of articles, and called to the first ''Tinget''. This wiki "

thing Thing or The Thing may refer to: Philosophy * An object * Broadly, an entity * Thing-in-itself (or ''noumenon''), the reality that underlies perceptions, a term coined by Immanuel Kant * Thing theory, a branch of critical theory that focuse ...

" of 24 November 2002 became the first instance akin to an

arbitration committee On Wikimedia Foundation projects, an Arbitration Committee (ArbCom) is a binding dispute resolution panel of editors. Each of Wikimedia's projects are editorially autonomous and independent, and some of them have established their own ArbComs w ...

on any Wikipedia language version, effectively making Swedish Wikipedia the first decentralised franchise while the rest of Wikipedia was still under Jim Wales' direct personal supervision. The first years, Swedish Wikipedia functioned as a small, foreign-franchised competitor to the independently Swedish UseModWiki Susning.nu created by Lars Aronsson in 2001, inspired by the

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is, along with the Simple English Wikipedia, one of two English-language editions of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was founded on January 15, 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition, and, as of , has the most arti ...

. However, the founder's decision to allow advertisement on the website from 20 November 2002 led Dan Koehl to switch over to Swedish Wikipedia, with several prolific contributors gradually following suit. Although Susning.nu became the world's second largest

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 pub ...

28 May 2003, in April 2004, its editing features were closed down to all but a handful of users, which further increased the flow to Swedish Wikipedia. On 14 January 2005, Wikipedia's article count surpassed that of Susning.nu. Susning.nu was shut down entirely in August 2009. In March 2006, the Swedish newspaper '' Svenska Dagbladet'' published a comparative evaluation of Swedish Wikipedia, Susning.nu and the online version of

Nationalencyklopedin ''Nationalencyklopedin'' (; "The National Encyclopedia" in English), abbreviated NE, is a comprehensive contemporary Swedish-language encyclopedia, initiated by a favourable loan from the Government of Sweden of 17 million Swedish kronor in 1 ...

. The evaluation was done by giving a selection of articles to independent subject matter experts for grading. While Nationalencyklopedin came out on top with respect to factuality and neutrality, Swedish Wikipedia received a good overall grade and came out on top with respect to being up to date and having a broad coverage, also including popular culture subjects.

Massive deletions in robot-made articles

On 27 September 2012 it reached 500,000 articles. On 15 June 2013 it reached 1,000,000 articles and rose from 8th to 5th place. This is in large part due to a community project where bots were used in producing articles for all existing species of plants and animals. When finished, this project alone created more than a million articles, most short and sourced through available online databases on the subject. In 2014 about half of its articles were created by a single bot. During 2015 and 2016, Lsjbot wrote more than 1 million geographical articles, increasing the number of articles to nearly 3.8 million by November 2016 when it stopped. While this practice allowed the Swedish Wikipedia to become the second largest worldwide, quality suffered from a lack of sourcing, shallow articles, duplicates, and outdated information. Facing these problems, tide turned against the bots and article deletions started outpacing new creations. From the 2016 maximum of 3.8 million articles, the count to below 3.3 million articles in March 2021, and as of December 2021, the count dropped below 2.8 million articles. SvWikipedia.png, Swedish Wikipedia's increase after the implementation of advertisements on Susning.nu 21 Nov. 2002 SV WP Growth.png, Article count 2001 to 2013.

Gallery

Wikipedia-logo-v2-sv-500k.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 500,000 article logo (September 2012) Wikipedia-logo-vLLen-sv-1M.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 1,000,000 article logo (June 2013) Wikipedia-logo-v2-se-2-million.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 2,000,000 article logo (September 2015) Wikipedia-logo-v2-se-3-million.svg, Swedish Wikipedia's 3,000,000 article logo (April 2016)

Topics

In 2019 the Swedish Wikipedia had 354,000 unique categories. The average article in this language version had 5 categories and ratio of unique categories to articles was 0.094. The categories with the largest number of articles in 2019 were ''Life'' (30%) and ''Geography'' (24%). In the Swedish Wikipedia, articles related to Geography and Life had the highest average quality. Content about Health was read more often and articles in the Events category had the highest average author interest.

Verifiability

In March 2020 the Swedish Wikipedia contained 20.1 million references, wherein 4.31% of them had a DOI and 0.72% of references contained an

ISBN The International Standard Book Number (ISBN) is a numeric commercial book identifier that is intended to be unique. Publishers purchase ISBNs from an affiliate of the International ISBN Agency. An ISBN is assigned to each separate edition an ...

References

External links

*
Swedish Wikipedia
*
Swedish Wikipedia mobile version
{{Wikipedias in Germanic languages Swedish encyclopedias Wikipedias by language Wikipedias in Germanic languages

Internet properties established in 2001 2001 establishments in the United States 2001 establishments in Sweden