Swedish academic author of 3m entries on Wikipedia

A Swedis academic has emerged as the author of nearly three million entries on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, The Australian reports.


Sverker Johansson, who has written about one in ten of Wikipedia’s 30 million pages, has told The Times that he would make sure every author in the British Library’s catalogue had an entry in the encyclopedia. He will turn to the matter once he has chronicled every species of animal and plant, living or dead.


Mr Johansson’s prolific authorship has been made possible by software that sucks information from the internet, databases and other digital sources, pieces it together and publishes it as Wikipedia entries. The software, known as Lsjbot, was designed by the 53-year-old Swede.


He began testing Lsjbot late in 2011 before a full launch in February 2012. Lsjbot allows him to create up to 10,000 new Wikipedia entries a day.


“I thought about the ultimate vision of Wikipedia, which is to provide the sum of all human knowledge to everybody on the planet,” he said. “You do this by taking knowledge that’s only available to specialists and making it available to everybody. I really believe in that vision. This is the best way I can help achieve it.”


He said that he saw other people “doing similar things on a small scale” but believed he could do it “better and bigger”.