Available in Swedish Website sv.wikipedia.org Registration Optional | Owner Wikimedia Foundation Commercial No | |
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Type of site Internet encyclopedia project | ||
The Swedish Wikipedia (Swedish: svenska Wikipedia, also svenskspråkiga Wikipedia) is the Swedish language edition of Wikipedia and was started on 23 May 2001. It is currently the third largest Wikipedia by article-count with its 3,785,117 current articles, though the average size of its articles is considerably lower than almost all other editions. This is reflected by a low article depth of 5.2 compared to the German edition's 99 and the French's 215.2, which both have fewer articles than the Swedish Wikipedia.
The Swedish Wikipedia has some conventions that differ from other editions of Wikipedia. The 67 administrators on the Swedish Wikipedia are elected for a fixed-term period of one year and have to be re-elected after that time. But Swedish Wiki hides the fact that a large group (12%) of administrators have been the same for longer than a decade now.
Of former contributors, 47% blamed lack of time for leaving, 30% blamed lack of competence, 19% some other reason, 14% would rather spend time at other internet sites, 11% blamed non-acceptance of their contributions, 11% blamed negative experiences of conflicts, 11% blamed complicated rules and 10% blamed changes outside of Wikipedia.
History
Originally, Swedish Wikipedia rivalled susning.nu, a wiki created by Lars Aronsson in 2001. susning.nu was by 28 May 2003 the world's second largest wiki. Due to several controversies involving the authority of the founder, objections to Aronsson's decision to allow advertisement on the site, and the lack of proper tools to fight vandalism, several prolific susning writers switched over to Swedish Wikipedia in 2002, and later more followed. In April 2004, susning.nu's 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.
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.
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 meant that during 2012 and 2013 the number of articles on Swedish Wikipedia more than doubled. This is in large part due to a community project where bots are used in producing articles for all existing species of plants and animals. When finished, this project alone will have created more than a million articles, most short and sourced through available online databases on the subject. To date, already about half of its articles were created by a single bot. Compared to most other Wikipedia editions with a similar number of articles, articles on Swedish Wikipedia have less content with an average of 1,897 bytes per article (as of May 2014). This is roughly half of that of the French, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish editions (3,986 – 4,277 bytes/article as of February 2014).