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User:LA2

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LA2 with internal ID 50 is the meta user identity for Lars Aronsson, Sweden. See also the English, German, and Swedish Wikipedia. I'm the founder of Project Runeberg, a website of digitized Scandinavian literature. I used to have a wiki named susning.nu.

Texts

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Diary

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June 26, 2019: My number of edits in various projects.

Year en.wp sv.wp commons en.wiki
source
sv.wiki
source
sv.wikt en.wikt da.wikt ru.wikt wiki
data
2001 616 - - - - - - - - -
2002 1,371 - - 3 - - - - - -
2003 2 17 - - - - - - - -
2004 51 123 - - - - - - - -
2005 204 586 656 723 - - - - - -
2006 584 2,384 334 4 5 1 2 - - 1
2007 537 2,389 118 15 17 25 12 - - -
2008 976 21,206 880 11 71 4 6 2 - -
2009 1,292 13,987 926 387 372 3 - - - -
2010 374 5,098 2,447 673 5,574 1,901 14,397 - 1 -
2011 172 2,517 1,209 190 5,768 63 14,074 2 - -
2012 166 638 1,708 1,032 67 13 589 - - 1
2013 131 1,441 878 398 24 90 1,407 2,953 1 59
2014 101 745 810 408 11 6 482 3 40 66
2015 45 422 305 3 8 215 745 5 11,037 100
2016 39 446 167 57 29 1,342 487 7 8,948 103
2017 31 295 207 162 36 19,101 479 12 545 1,720
2018 24 218 291 1 27 47,085 302 1 176 521
2019 5 100 116 1 9 22,524 104 1 73 172

September 22-25, 2017: I attend the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2017 in Warsaw (representing Sweden, which is now part of the CEE community), and give a presentation on how to use Parallel corpora based on Wikisource to support foreign language contributions in Wiktionary. Video (30 minutes) is available on Youtube.

September 10-13, 2015: I attend the Wikimedia CEE Meeting 2015 in Tartu as an individual. I give two lightning talks on how to contribute to Wiktionary.

May 12, 2011: An example:

Bridge Length (metres)
Golden Gate Bridge
2737.4
Brooklyn Bridge
1825

September 13, 2009: I left foundation-l. The unmoderated list was hijacked by a few people with nothing to say, but posting a lot. Too much meta discussions followed. The Wikimedia Foundation did nothing to stop them, so I have to stop this flow of mud from entering my inbox.

September 9, 2007: The other year, when I was trying to improve the help pages of the Swedish Wikipedia, I found that many pages had been started from an existing technical mechanism in the software, such as templates. Even though templates are very general purpose, their use has evolved into a few strong categories such as navigation boxes, infoboxes, source references, etc. Infoboxes and their subvariety taxoboxes in biology are in fact older than templates, since they started as simple HTML tables, copied into each article. So rather than writing a help page for templates, I wrote a help page for infoboxes, trying to describe how they were used for a purpose (what and why) rather than which software mechanism they were based upon (how). There is a definite date when support for templates was introduced in the software. The same goes for MediaWiki's table syntax and categories. But very similar use patterns predate these introductions: designing tables with HTML or preformated text, and using list pages as a precursor for categories. The entire system of tools for structuring the world's knowledge (as is Wikipedia's goal) can be fully understood only if we document the historic evolution of these mechanisms, use patterns and their associated policies. This reasoning is not limited to Wikipedia. On Wikisource, the use of scanned page images and proofreading instructions predate the introduction of the "Page" extension. Categories are used not only for arranging articles by subject, but also for indicating quality standards and grouping articles with deficiencies (such as stubs). Maybe Wikibooks and Wikinews has similar patterns?

So, is anybody documenting this historic evolution of tools? When reading through the History of Wikipedia article on the English Wikipedia, it strikes me that this article writes the history, rather than writing about the history from a distance. There are references to a few history papers, such as Larry Sanger's recollection of the early days, but nobody seems to have written the History of Wikipedia outside of Wikipedia itself. So the WP article is very much "original research", which it shouldn't be. With Wikipedia still in its first decade, perhaps that is asking too much. But two thirds of that decade have past, and maybe its time to think about writing the history. Why not start on Wikibooks? My own interest would focus on the technology, tools and policies used to organize knowledge on a large scale. This is not just the history of the Mediawiki software, but also how the software features are used by the large Wikipedia community. Someone else might prefer to write about social interaction between users or certain kinds of social and systemic bias, such as gender issues.

The closest Wikibooks project that I have found is Wiki Science, but it is a little too wide in scope. Looking around Wikibooks, I'm getting depressed by all the half-started and abandoned projects. This makes me think twice about starting a new Wikibook project, since I don't want mine to be among the abandoned ones. Maybe inactive and unfinished projects should be removed (deleted or pushed out of sight, to the "attic"), to improve the quality of the average project? I'll leave these thoughts here for now and see if they mature.