The Swedish Wikipedia (Swedish: Svenskspråkiga Wikipedia) is the Swedish-language edition of Wikipedia and was started on the 23 of May 2001.[1] It is currently the fifth largest Wikipedia by article count with its 2,581,806 current articles, it has a Wikipedia article depth of 17.48.[2] A majority were generated by Lsjbot, a bot, or software application.[3]
The administrators on the Swedish Wikipedia (currently 64) are elected for a fixed-term period of one year and have to be re-elected after that time.[4]
History
Screenshot of sv.wikipedia.com on 23 May 2001, using the "Phase I" UseModWiki software
Swedish Wikipedia was launched by Jimmy Wales on the 23 May 2001 as Wikipedia's 4th language version.[5] The "Phase I" UseModWiki software for sv.wikipedia.com was translated by Linus Tolke [pl; sv] and the "Phase III" MediaWiki was translated by Dan Koehl together with Johan Dahlin and Max Walter.[6] The latter, contemporary PHP-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" of 24 November 2002 became the first instance akin to an arbitration committee on any Wikipedia language version, effectively making Swedish Wikipedia the first decentralised franchise while the rest of Wikipedia was still under Jimmy Wales' direct personal supervision.[7]
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. 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.[citation needed] Although Susning.nu became the world's second largest wiki 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.[8] 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. 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.[9]
Massive deletions in robot-made articles
On 27 September 2012 it reached 500,000 articles.[10] On 15 June 2013 it reached 1,000,000 articles and rose from 8th to 5th place.[11] 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.[12] In 2014 about half of its articles were created by a single bot.[13] 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,[14] 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.
Swedish Wikipedia's increase after the implementation of advertisements on Susning.nu 21 November 2002
Article count 2001 to 2013
Gallery
Swedish Wikipedia's 500,000 article logo (September 2012)
Swedish Wikipedia's 1,000,000 article logo (June 2013)
Swedish Wikipedia's 2,000,000 article logo (September 2015)
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed]
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