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LA2 (with internal ID number 445) is the Wikipedia identity for Lars Aronsson, Sweden, also active on the German and Swedish Wikipedia. He is a professional computer programmer and a self-employed consultant [1]. He is also the founder and coordinator of Project Runeberg, a volunteer effort to digitize classic Scandinavian literature [2].
On some languages, I operate LA2-bot (talk · contribs).
Soon after joining Wikipedia in the spring of 2001, I had a minor controversy with Larry Sanger, and to avoid escalation* I left Wikipedia and later that year started my own wiki, susning.nu, in Swedish. I summarized my early experience in a paper Operation of a Large Scale, General Purpose Wiki Website (2002).
- *) Swedes are conflict-avoiding, which is easily explained by natural selection. When two prehistoric Germans had an argument, the one of them who had the instinct to avoid conflict would move north. This is how Scandinavia was populated.
Everything went fine for a few years, and susning.nu was the world's 3rd biggest wiki for some time. In November 2002 about half of its contributors left for the Swedish Wikipedia, which then got a fast start, but this didn't slow susning.nu down. However, in the spring of 2004 various forms of vandalism got out of hand, and I decided to close the site to editing on April 15, 2004. At the time it had 55,000 articles, while the Swedish Wikipedia had 23,000. One year later the numbers were 57,000 and 70,000, respectively. According to Alexa.com, susning.nu was once Sweden's 94th most visited website with a global ranking of 16,000. The success of susning.nu can be attributed to liberal policies (it is not strictly an encyclopedia) and excellent software performance in times when Wikipedia was very slow.
In the summer of 2004 at the Wizards of OS conference in Berlin, I first met Jimbo Wales, Sunir Shah and some leading German wikipedians, and saw the founding of the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. In 2005, following the first Wikimania, I pioneered the use of scanned page images in Wikisource. In October 2007 I helped to set up the Swedish chapter, where I was a member of the board until February 2012. In 2008 I visited Wikimania in Egypt and helped to organize Wikipedia Academy 2008 in Lund, Sweden.