Susning.nu

Susning.nu was/is a Swedish language wiki, started in October 2001 by Lars Aronsson (also the founder of Project Runeberg), and it ran for three years as an open wiki. In April 2004, Susning had over 60,000 articles on various topics, making it the largest Swedish wikis at the time. Aronsson's stated original aim for Susning was "to make it into whatever the users want it to be." As such, Susning was/is an encyclopedia, a dictionary, and a discussion forum about any concept of interest to its users. It was in direct competition with the Swedish Wikipedia and could perhaps be compared in scope to Everything2.

On April 15 2004, due to heavy vandalism by users who (amongst other things) included large quantities of pornography, all editing was disabled except for very few selected accounts. New account creation was also closed, effectively freezing the site. This state lasted for three years until about October 2007, when the site started to be opened during Sunday afternoons, and in about February 2008 this was expanded to include one hour every weekday. It it not clear whether this trend will continue or what Aronsson's current intentions are. It is likely that the problem of vandalism is greater for Susning.nu than for other wikis, since Susning.nu does not have any administrators who can block vandals 'in action'. The only one having administrative privileges is Lars Aronsson, who has allegedlyFact|date=January 2008 never used them.

Unlike its main competitor the Swedish Wikipedia, Susning.nu places advertisements on practically all its articles. It also has no license agreement, so contributions remain copyrighted by their submitters (the right to modify is said to be implicit in the site's function). This, in turn, means that third parties, such as Wikipedia editors, cannot legally use Susning.nu materials contributed by others without permission. It also means that Susning.nu depends solely on Lars Aronsson's goodwill to continue. He has repeatedly stated that he sees the site as his own personal project, to do with whatever he wants to.

Susning uses a heavily-modified version of UseModWiki as its wiki engine. The domain name .nu, which belongs to the 260-km² island of Niue but is sold primarily to foreigners, was chosen because it means "now" in Swedish (and also in Danish and Dutch). "Skaffa dig en Susning.nu" is the slogan of Susning and translates to "Get a clue.now". The standard top level domain for Sweden is .se.

See also

Other wiki encyclopedias:

* Enciclopedia Libre
* Wikiweise (German)
* WikiZnanie (Russian)
*List of online encyclopedias

External links

* [http://susning.nu/ Susning.nu]
* 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 Vary [http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/elpub02/] , 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, Czech Republic, 6-8 November, 2002, Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung Berlin, 2002, ISBN 3-89700-357-0, pages 27-37. [http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html Online copy] .