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by kamray23 821 days ago
Wikipedia displaced traditional encyclopedias. The number of encyclopedias produced in Finnish fell from ~10 to 1 in the last two decades, that one being fiwiki. The same is true for many languages. What once was a normal thing middle-class families kept in a vitrine is now something old-fashioned and rare. There are no physical copies being printed nor online versions accessible and actively edited. There were online versions, but they were too costly to operate and shut down due to being outcompeted by Wikipedia. There is only fiwiki.
1 comments

As I've mentioned in other comments, that's not directly related to the rise of Wikipedia because most people no longer read encyclopedias in the way they used to decades ago. I have a counterexample as well; major encyclopedias and dictionaries in Korea are kept alive by portal websites nowadays, but these portals never tried to adopt kowiki instead. (I was one of earlier administrators in kowiki during that transition period, if you wonder.) A better hypothesis for Finnish would therefore be a lack of such sponsors to keep them alive, and that would be completely orthogonal to the existence or absence of fiwiki.
It's not orthogonal, though. We had online encyclopedias for around a decade, they functioned extremely well, and it was the way people got their information. During the latter part of that decade fiwiki started to really pick up steam (although it was years old by that point) and very quickly every other encyclopedia ran out of users and therefore revenue. The concept worked well, it's the movement of users to a competing product that caused their downfall, and therefore it is definitely fiwiki that is the issue.