Lars Aronsson

Hi, I'm an independent consultant in LinkopingSweden. Sometimes I'm in StockholmSweden, too. Find my coordinates at http://aronsson.se/

I most often go to http://c2.com/cgi/quickChanges | FindPage | http://c2.com/cgi/topten?do=all&do=counts&do=wiki

August 2005: I meet Ward at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt, Germany. My most recent interests include GPS and mapping. On August 27 the Swedish Wikipedia reaches 100,000 articles, the fifth largest language at Wikipedia and the probably fifth biggest wiki in the world.

January 14, 2005: At 57,564 articles the Swedish Wikipedia grows bigger than susning.nu.

June 2004: I meet Jimbo and Sunir at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin.

April 2004: Massive vandalism makes me close editing of susning.nu (55,000 articles) to a small group of trusted individuals. The big crowd moves over to the Swedish Wikipedia (22,000 articles), joining those who moved in November 2002.

October 2003: I meet Erik Möller in Berlin.

November 2002: I publish a paper, Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website. Experience from susning.nu's first nine months in service, http://aronsson.se/wikipaper.html My website http://susning.nu/ is the world's 3rd biggest wiki with 14,000 articles (only this site and Wikipedia are bigger, see http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?BiggestWiki ), and it has just had its first "fork", which spilled into the Swedish language Wikipedia. More about this on Meatball, see http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?SusningNu

November 2001: Wikipedia is now about as big (16,000+ articles) as C2 (18,000+ articles). My own susning.nu has 3,000+ articles after a few months of operation. I'm beginning to ask myself if there are any other really big Wiki websites out there. Wikipedia evolves by adding wiki pages for years/decades/centuries in history and for "orders of magnitudes". Susning.nu evolves by expanding the text substitution rules in the Perl script (maps, ISBN, translation, ...).

October 1, 2001: I opened my own general-purpose Wiki website in Swedish, called susning.nu (http://susning.nu/). It is based on UseModWiki. It does contain a gazetteer of the world, currently based on Mapblast maps.

May 2001: I just learned about WikiWiki through http://www.wikipedia.com/ and my wireless friends in PortlandOregon, at PersonalTelco. It was a nice surprise to discover the close connection between WikiWiki and ExtremeProgramming, and to find old friends like DavidByers and StaffanMalmgren here.

Lars, is it possible to persuade you not to add a complete gazetteer for Scandinavia to Wiki? It isn't really appropriate. Thanks. -- GarethMcCaughan

I already got the question (from you?) at the end of the SwedishXpCommunity page. I did have a purpose for defining these names: I wanted to find other people from my city and country who were here. The idea of WikiCategories suggests an excellent way of automatically indexing the pages in a wiki web by creating a category page and clicking its title to find pages that link to it. By making a wiki page for LinkopingSweden, with links to CategoryCity and SwedenEurope, I could invest a minimal effort and create a useful tool. I then rewrote the existing place names on SwedishXpCommunity and created pages for the cities that were already mentioned there. I did not make pages for ReykjavikIceland, UppsalaSweden or OdenseDenmark, because I didn't see them mentioned anywhere, and I have no plans on adding a complete gazetteer (not in this wiki, anyway :-). Hope this makes my point clear. You don't have to agree with me (YouArentGonnaNeedIt), but I would love to hear your comments. -- LarsAronsson

Lars, use the "Find" link at the bottom of every page. It's a lot more automatic and doesn't require creating a null page for every town in Scandinavia.

(The question there wasn't from me, no.) What you suggest is an interesting use of Wiki, but I don't think it's a good one. Adding pages for every Scandinavian place name found in Wiki doesn't (so far as I can see) benefit Wiki as a whole; creating so many pages just to find other people from your area seems unfair. The principle to apply (with caution!) is "How would I feel if everyone on Wiki started doing this?". I think the answer in this case is obvious: the "noise" would be excessive, and everyone would lose.

If there are local folks on Wiki who won't show themselves in response to SwedishXpCommunity itself, it seems unlikely that adding all those extra pages will help, anyway! -- GarethMcCaughan

Sorry, I don't understand the reference to "noise" here. Could you please explain this? Is it a problem to have more pages? Or is geographic information less useful or interesting than other information? I wish the WikiStatistics would cover a week or month, so we could get numbers on actual usage rather than guessing at what is useful. -- LarsAronsson.

Go ahead and add the pages if you think they are useful. I fail to see the downside to people that aren't interested. -- AndyPierce

By "noise" I mean (1) clutter in RecentChanges as the pages are added, (2) having a multitude of unnecessary pages (not a big deal; it's an aesthetic thing, I think), and (3) pages having basically no connection to Ward's original vision of Wiki as an InformalHistoryOfProgrammingIdeas. Of course, that original vision is pretty badly fogged already, but I think it's worth trying to retain some focus as a defence against Wiki turning into yet another SlashDot.

I'm not really all that bothered by all the Scandinavian-place pages you've been adding, despite my curmudgeonly comments. I hope I haven't caused offence. I just think it's a bad idea, on the whole.

See WikiIsNotaDictionary (another page AndyPierce doesn't like...) for comments from others on the same theme. See especially WardCunningham's remarks, since ItsWardsWiki.

[Wiki can be driven to pointless tangents by careless formation of hyperlinks. For example, say I use the phrase "big mac" in a contribution, alluding to the heavily marketed hamburger. Does wiki need a definition of big mac? No way. Although some readers might benefit from a definition, in light of our AmericanCulturalAssumption(s), such a definition would be better included within the prose as above than as a footnote or hyperlink. Ask yourself: if the page you cite were to be created, would it serve wiki well as a point of entry in this web of knowledge?]

-- GarethMcCaughan

I'm not offended, and I like to find out what people think. I am skeptic to intentions though, as they are abstractions of things that will come, just like the mythical BigDesignUpFront. See my comment on this at the end of AllAbstractionsLie. I agree on (1) and regret that RecentChanges gets cluttered, but you have to be more concrete on (2) and (3) before I am convinced. The place names that I added are a few select cities that do have high concentrations of computer companies, and I think (though I could be wrong) that many wiki users will find it interesting to mention these names in their home pages, thus there is a connection to the (real) world of ExtremeProgramming and programming ideas. -- LarsAronsson.

May I suggest a few days of "lurking" before diving headlong into creating pages? ;) -- AndersBengtsson

Hi, Anders. You may suggest anything you want, as far as I am concerned, but I prefer to base my actions on substantial / factual arguments, not on authoritarian ones. So tell me if I did anything that would have been wrong if you had done it. -- LarsAronsson.

Pages that are international, regional or local but which contain information which is interest to "some" of those participating in this wiki are additions which should be encouraged as "points of entry". Since everyone is not interested in everything contained here there will inevitably be islands of information and knowledge which serve only a segment of those involved in this wiki. These islands of information which some describe as "walled gardens", may be walled by walls not built by the gardener, but rather by those who would choose to exclude rather than include based on their own personal tastes and opinions. If so, they can simply choose to notReadEveryPageOnTheWiki. I myself would rather view the "gardens" and determine for my self whether there is beauty to behold in its flowers (light) or that there is an ugliness or that it is filled with disorganized or inappropriate weeds (noise). But interestingly, even weeds (noise) can generate and display floweres (light), Surely the presence of information is better than the lack of it. I may always choose to visit and/or participate in such pages or to ignore them.

Did you create the page for Iceland? Just wondered.

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