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Swedish Wiki vet sets new content record

TT/The Local
TT/The Local - [email protected]
Swedish Wiki vet sets new content record
File photo: TT

With 2,7 million articles under his belt, a Swede tops the list over the amount of items published on online encyclopedia Wikipedia, making up almost one tenth of the total content on the site.

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The online encyclopedia Wikipedia is famous for containing information about almost every subject, including topics such as history, arts and science. It allows its users to freely edit all the information on the website.
 
The Swedish Wiki enthusiast Sverker Johansson from Falun in central Sweden has emerged as the leading contributor to the website, posting a grand total of 2.7 million articles, or 8.5 percent of the site's total content, granting him the status of the most prolific user.
 
"I'm doing this to create absolute democracy online," Johansson told The Wall Street Journal.
 
To aid him in the process of uploading as many as 10,000 articles in a good day, he has developed a bot which he calls "Lsjbot", a tool designed to go through various databases, gather information and package it into an article.
 
"Some people consider that cheating. But my view on it is that everyone uses different tools to write and I use slightly sharper tools than most," Johansson told the TT news agency.
 
One third of the Wikipedia veteran's posts were posted in Swedish, while the rest were composed in two versions of Filipino, his wife's native tongue. He was especially proud of his contribution to covering towns in the Philippines, while also being particularly active in the biology category, writing about plants and animals.
 
"I feel proud to have contributed so much to making our accumulated knowledge available to everyone."
 
Next up, Johansson stated he would take on the National Library of Sweden's (Kungliga Biblioteket) catalogue of authors, claiming the female authors were not receiving as much attention as their male colleagues.
 
"The bot generates articles regardless of gender," he told TT.
 
"Otherwise they're mainly written by young, white, male nerds and reflect male interests."
 

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