Jens Edlund, Jan Ainali
The Swedish language Wikipedia started in May 2001 which makes it one of the very earliest of the more than 280 language varieties of Wikipedia today. Since September 2015 it is, with in excess of two million articles on-line, also the second largest after the English language Wikipedia in terms of articles published. This has been achieved with the help of a number of strategies. An early effort was Projekt Nordisk Familjebok, where articles from early 20th century editions of Swedish encyclopedia for which he copyright had expired were added more or less systematically.These articles reflect another era in many ways: linguistically, politically, and factually. The thousands of Wikipedia articles that were created from Nordisk Familjebok have now largely been edited to an extent where they can be viewed as newly written - in many cases little or nothing of the original remains. This gradual modernisation of a large number of century-old articles took place in around ten years, and we believe there is much of interest to be found by investigating this process. How has the vocabulary evolved? Are there specific constructions that were weeded out first? What type of changes received the highest priority? At the time of writing, we have merely begun perusing the material and outline methods of investigation, so this presentation will not contain proper research results or even good statistics, but rather be limited to an overview of the material and some preliminary insights and thoughts.