page_title: Swedish Wikipedia
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Swedish Wikipedia / History
context_page_description: The Swedish 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 3,689,834 current articles, where a majority are generated by a bot, or software application, and has a Wikipedia article depth of 7.35.
  The administrators on the Swedish Wikipedia are elected for a fixed-term period of one year and have to be re-elected after that time.
context_section_description: Swedish Wikipedia was launched by Jim Wales on 23 May 2001 as Wikipedia's 4th language version. The "Phase I" UseModWiki software for sv.wikipedia.com was translated by Linus Tolke and the "Phase III" MediaWiki was translated by Dan Koehl together with Johan Dahlin and Max Walter. 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 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 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. 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. 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.
  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 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.
caption: Screenshot of sv.wikipedia.com on 23 May 2001, using the "Phase I" UseModWiki software.
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