Scandinavian Planet Wikimedia launched

Thanks to Rob, who fixed bug 16511, the Scandinavian-language Planet Wikimedia is now a reality. I proposed the idea in all the village pumps for Scandinavian languages in November, and the idea got lots of support. Also, three Wikipedians started blogging because they liked the idea.

It is the first multi-language Planet, using the ISO 639-5 code gmq, representing North Germanic languages (also known as Scandinavian languages in the anglophone world). The interface has been translated to all Scandinavian languages with Wikipedias (yes, even Faroese), but the blog posts are shared between all languages.

I am hoping this will lead to more experience-sharing and opinion exchange between Scandinavians – we have a good coöperation already, but as with pretty much anything related to Wikipedia, it has room for improvement.

Great Scandinavian news

Within just 6 hours today, the Swedish Wikipedia and the Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia reached the 300.000 and 200.000 article milestones, respectively.

The Swedish Wikipedia’s 300.000^th was Arvidsjaurs kyrka (nb), about the local church in Arvidsjaur. It was created at 14:23 CET.

The Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia’s 200.000^th article was John de Vere, 12. jarl av Oxford (en) (nl). It was created at 20:26 CET.

The Danish Wikipedia is also coming close to a big milestone; as of writing this, it has 98.700 articles. The Nynorsk Wikipedia has currently has 43.200 articles. In total, the mutually intelligible Continental Scandinavian language Wikipedias have about 641.000 articles – if they had been combined, that would have been the fourth largest Wikipedia by number of articles, below French and above Polish.

If the Insular Scandinavian language Wikipedias, Icelandic (23.500) and Faroese (3.500) had been counted, the article count would have been 668.000.

Another bit of Scandinavian news is that a Scandinavian-language Planet Wikimedia will soon be set up (only waiting for Brion *cough*), collecting blogs in Scandinavian languages on one page (and one feed). It will be located at http://gmq.planet.wikimedia.org/ (gmq is the ISO 639-5 code for North Germanic languages).