Surprisingly long, Swedish has held the 10th place among the largest languages of Wikipedia. Swedish is spoken by only 9 million people and the following two places are held by Russian and Chinese.

Some say the high rank is held in part because of many very short articles: stubs and even "substubs". This is true, but the high ranking of some languages (including Polish and Dutch) in this first decade of Wikipedia is rather to be explained by the late coming of the major languages. Arabic is still trailing at 31. Swedish has been falling from 6th to its current 10th place.

All of April, the Swedish Wikipedia has been active with merging "substubs" into larger units. As a result, the over all size of the Swedish Wikipedia has been flat around 282,000 articles, while the Russian Wikipedia has continued to grow at a healthy pace. The difference in size is now only 5000 articles. Any day or week soon, Russian will capture the 10th place. This will be a great event, but what about the timing?

The Russian wikipedians already missed the 200th anniversary of the conquest of Sveaborg (May 3, 1808). I don't think they will time today's final in the ice hockey world championships. But I also think they will be too early for the 299th anniversary of the battle of Poltava (July 8, 1709). So we will have to find some other way to mark the Russian victory for a place around the puzzle globe (http://www.wikipedia.org/).

As part of WikiProject Sweden (Википедия:Проект:Швеция), they started yesterday a subpage "Swedish Week" (Шведская неделя). The idea is to fill these last days of Swedish dominance with writing new articles about Sweden. Yesterday, Saturday May 17, was Norway's independence day but this didn't stop the Russians from creating an article about the National holiday of Sweden, as well as 50 other new articles pertaining to Sweden.

From a Swedish perspective, this isn't too bad. To quote ABBA:

"I feel like I win, when I lose" (Waterloo, 1974).

http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B...

The surrender of Sveaborg ([[Suomenlinna]]) fortress at Helsinki in 1808 and the [[battle of Poltava]] in the Ukraine in 1709 are the two most famous Swedish military losses to Russia. A Russian expression for helplessness is "like a Swede at Poltava", but this is not at all how I feel today.

Still, I had hoped that this year's ice hockey championships, played in Quebec ([[2008 Men's World Ice Hockey Championships]]), would provide retaliation, but yesterday Sweden lost out at 4th place without medals and Russia is playing the final today against Canada in just a few hours.

It is surprising how well hockey-playing nations (Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, USA, Germany, Poland, Czech Replublic) are doing in Wikipedia. Maybe this is what the Arabs should try.