Susning.nu

» see susning.nu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

For its first three years Susning.nu was bigger than Swedish Wikipedia. In a language with fewer than ten million speakers, the open encyclopedia that mattered was a one-man project on a domain hack, and Wikipedia was the challenger rather than the incumbent. Swedish Wikipedia did not pass it until 14 January 2005.

Lars Aronsson started it on 31 August 2001 and released it publicly on 1 October. The name ends in.nu, which is Niue's country code and also the Swedish word for now, and half the Swedish web of that era was built on that pun. Aronsson was already running Project Runeberg, a volunteer effort to digitize out-of-copyright Scandinavian literature, so he came to this with a decade of experience in the unglamorous work of putting text online and keeping it there.

It grew by roughly ten thousand articles in its first year. By October 2003 there were fifty-eight thousand, and at the peak in April 2004 more than sixty thousand. There were Google ads on the front page paying for the server.

Swedish is not a language I read, and Sweden in 2003 sits about as far from a Turkish dial-up account as the web got while still being the same web. What makes this one legible from the outside is that every language had a version of it. Before Wikipedia was the obvious answer everywhere, someone in each language was running the local attempt, usually alone, usually on a domain they paid for personally. Most of those lost, and most of them lost the same way this one did.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

Susning was not organized like Wikipedia and did not try to be. It ran encyclopedia articles and open discussion in the same space without separating them, so a page could be a definition one week and an argument the next. There was no separate talk namespace and no formal editorial policy. If you thought something belonged, you wrote it in.

That looseness is why it grew fast and it is also why it could not defend itself. Wikipedia's page histories and rollback tools were built by a project with contributors specifically working on the problem of vandalism. Susning had one person maintaining the software, and he was also the one answering the mail.

~ the vandal ~

The attacks got serious in early 2004 and the defense went up in stages, each one failing. A karma system arrived on 22 February 2004 and was switched off again on 25 March. Image uploads were disabled on 5 April, then turned back on with restrictions. Someone found a bug that let them get around the restrictions and used it to upload pornography, and someone else, or the same person, automated deletion with a script and emptied thousands of articles in the time it takes to make coffee.

On 15 April 2004 Aronsson fixed the bug, and a few minutes later he shut off editing for everyone. He announced that passwords would be introduced. What actually happened is that the wiki stopped being a wiki that afternoon and never started again. Sixty thousand articles sat there, readable and frozen, for another five years.

~ the license ~

The vandal gets the blame in most accounts, and the vandal was not the whole story. Back in November 2002 there had been a dispute over licensing: the content was not released under the GNU Free Documentation License, which meant nobody could take it and fork it and continue elsewhere. Wikipedia's content could be. Active contributors began moving over then, a year and a half before the doors were locked.

That is the part worth carrying out of this grave. A wiki whose text cannot be copied away is a wiki that dies when its owner stops, and the writers seem to have understood that faster than the owner did. When editing was locked in 2004, the people who would have argued about it had already gone.

~ where the domain went ~

The last archived capture of the working site is 23 April 2009. The front page still says Startsida and still carries the Google ad slot, with the frozen article count sitting under it. English Wikipedia puts the full shutdown at mid-August 2009 and records that no reason was ever given, which matches: after April there is nothing.

The domain stayed with Aronsson and got repurposed. By June 2013 susning.nu was serving his own business homepage, Aronsson Datateknik, with a street address in Linköping and a paragraph describing him as an independent contractor working in Perl and Java on Linux. Captures of that page run to May 2024. Today the domain has no DNS record at all, so the encyclopedia and the consulting page went the same way in the end.

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