Spanish Wikipedia
Encyclopedia
The Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia
, a free, online encyclopedia
. It currently has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently, it is the 6th largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, having surpassed Polish Wikipedia
on October 26, 2011 and being surpassed by the Dutch Wikipedia
on October 30. Long before it had been the 6th largest edition of Wikipedia, until the Portuguese language Wikipedia overtook it in May 2005, the Italian edition
in August 2005, and others later, going down to the 10th position. On November 18, 2007 the Spanish Wikipedia reached 300,000 articles.
In February 2002, many participants of the edition did not agree with the (later rejected) proposal to finance Wikipedia through advertising, and broke away to establish the Enciclopedia Libre
fork. After the spin-off, the Spanish Wikipedia had very little activity until the upgrade to the Phase III of the software, later renamed MediaWiki
, when the number of new users started to increase again. Both projects continue to co-exist, but the Spanish Wikipedia is by far the more active of the two.
. However, it is ranked fifth with respect to the classification for number of articles, below other Wikipedias devoted to languages with smaller speaking populations such as those of Wikipedia in German
, French
and Italian
. In terms of quality, parameters such as article size (over 2 KB: 40%) show it as the second out of the ten largest Wikipedias after the German one. As of November 2007, Spanish Wikipedia is the second Wikipedia in terms of traffic.
In terms of country of origin, by September 2006, Spain was the main contributor to the Spanish Wikipedia (39.2% of edits). It is followed by Argentina (10.7%), Chile (8.8%), The Netherlands (8.4%), Mexico (7.0%), Venezuela (5.1%), Peru (3.5%), the United States (3.1%), Colombia (2.7%), Uruguay (1.3%) and Germany (1.1%).
Among the countries where Spanish is an official language, Argentina
and Spain
have established a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation
. They were founded on 1 September 2007 and 11 February 2011 respectively.
A comparative study of the Fundación Colegio Libre de Eméritos Universitarios made by Prof. Arias Maldonado (University of Malaga) comparing some articles with those of the English and German Wikipedia concludes that the Spanish version of the Wikipedia is the least reliable of the three, more cumbersome and imprecise than the German and English Wikipedias, usually lacking reliable sources with many unreferenced data, and too dependent on online references.
During Wikimania 2009, free-software activist Richard Stallman
criticized the Spanish Wikipedia for restricting links to the Rebelion.org
left-wing Web site and allegedly banning users who had complained about what had happened. Participants in the Spanish Wikipedia responded that Rebelion.org is primarily a news aggregator, that links to aggregators should be replaced with links to original publishers whenever possible, and that they considered the issue to be one of spam
.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, a free, online encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
. It currently has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently, it is the 6th largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, having surpassed Polish Wikipedia
Polish Wikipedia
Polish Wikipedia is the Polish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. The ninth-oldest edition of Wikipedia, it was started on September 26, 2001. With about articles, it is the seventh-largest Wikipedia edition, after the English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Spanish...
on October 26, 2011 and being surpassed by the Dutch Wikipedia
Dutch Wikipedia
The Dutch Wikipedia is the Dutch-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. As of November 2011, the Dutch Wikipedia is the fourth-largest Wikipedia edition, with over articles.-History:...
on October 30. Long before it had been the 6th largest edition of Wikipedia, until the Portuguese language Wikipedia overtook it in May 2005, the Italian edition
Italian Wikipedia
The Italian Wikipedia is the Italian-language edition of Wikipedia. This edition was created on May 11, 2001 and first edited on June 11, 2001. As of 2011 it has over articles and more than registered accounts...
in August 2005, and others later, going down to the 10th position. On November 18, 2007 the Spanish Wikipedia reached 300,000 articles.
In February 2002, many participants of the edition did not agree with the (later rejected) proposal to finance Wikipedia through advertising, and broke away to establish the Enciclopedia Libre
Enciclopedia Libre
Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language wiki encyclopedia, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. It uses the MediaWiki software. It started as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia.-History:...
fork. After the spin-off, the Spanish Wikipedia had very little activity until the upgrade to the Phase III of the software, later renamed MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
, when the number of new users started to increase again. Both projects continue to co-exist, but the Spanish Wikipedia is by far the more active of the two.
Key dates
- March 16, 2001: Jimmy WalesJimmy WalesJimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
announced the internationalization of Wikipedia. - May 11, 2001: The Spanish Wikipedia is established along with eight other wikis. Its first domain was spanish.wikipedia.com.
- May 21, 2001: The oldest known article, Países del Mundo, is created.
- February 26, 2002: many contributors left to form the Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español, rejecting perceived censorship and the possibility of advertising on the Bomis-supported Wikipedia
- October 23, 2002: the domain es.wikipedia.com is changed to es.wikipedia.org.
- June 30, 2003: the mailing list for the Spanish Wikipedia is created (Wikies-l).
- October 6, 2003: first botInternet botInternet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone...
created on this Wikipedia. Its user name is SpeedyGonzalez. - July 18, 2004: the Spanish edition switches to UTF-8UTF-8UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
, allowing any character to be used directly in forms. - December 9, 2004: it is decided that Wikipedia in Spanish will use free images only.
- August 24, 2006: three checkusers are elected. They can examine IP addressIP addressAn Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
es. - December 11, 2006: following a vote, the Arbitration Committee, whose local name is Comité de Resolución de Conflictos (CRC) is created.
- June 11, 2007: last local image was erased, so all media is retrieved from Wikimedia CommonsWikimedia CommonsWikimedia Commons is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation....
. - September 1, 2007: first local chapter of Wikimedia Foundation is created in a Spanish-speaking country (ArgentinaArgentinaArgentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
). - December 13, 2008: it was decided to eliminate the stub template from Spanish Wikipedia.
- March 25, 2009: the first oversighters are elected. They can delete edits so they cannot be seen by regular administrators.
- April 15, 2009: the Arbitration Committee is dissolved after a vote.
Size and users
It has the second largest population of users, after the English WikipediaEnglish Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
. However, it is ranked fifth with respect to the classification for number of articles, below other Wikipedias devoted to languages with smaller speaking populations such as those of Wikipedia in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
and Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
. In terms of quality, parameters such as article size (over 2 KB: 40%) show it as the second out of the ten largest Wikipedias after the German one. As of November 2007, Spanish Wikipedia is the second Wikipedia in terms of traffic.
In terms of country of origin, by September 2006, Spain was the main contributor to the Spanish Wikipedia (39.2% of edits). It is followed by Argentina (10.7%), Chile (8.8%), The Netherlands (8.4%), Mexico (7.0%), Venezuela (5.1%), Peru (3.5%), the United States (3.1%), Colombia (2.7%), Uruguay (1.3%) and Germany (1.1%).
Among the countries where Spanish is an official language, Argentina
Argentina
Argentina , officially the Argentine Republic , is the second largest country in South America by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires...
and Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
have established a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...
. They were founded on 1 September 2007 and 11 February 2011 respectively.
Usage in Spain
Following a study by Netsuus (online market analysis enterprises) regarding the use of Wikipedia in Spain, it was revealed that most of the users consult Spanish Wikipedia (97%) when compared to wikipedias in other regional languages (2.17% in Wikipedia in Catalan, 0.64% in Galician and 0.26% in Basque.)Differences with other Wikipedias
- The Spanish Wikipedia only accepts free images, and has rejected fair useFair useFair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders...
since 2004, after a public vote. In 2006, it was decided to phase out the use of local image uploads and to exclusively use Wikimedia CommonsWikimedia CommonsWikimedia Commons is an online repository of free-use images, sound and other media files. It is a project of the Wikimedia Foundation....
for images and other media in the future. - Unlike the French and English Wikipedias, the Spanish Wikipedia did not have an Arbitration Committee; the first elections for an Arbitration Committee were held in January 2007. It comprises seven members, chosen by public vote.
- Some templates, like the navigation templates, or the presentation of the geographical coordinates next to the article's title have been deprecated.
- Terminology in Spanish: The equivalent to the English Wikipedia's featured articles and good articles are artículos destacados and artículos buenos respectively. Also, following a vote on August 2004, administrators in the Spanish Wikipedia took the name of bibliotecarios (librarians in English). Other discarded options were usuarios especiales (special users) or basureros (janitors).
Criticism
One of the issues that causes most controversy amongst editors is the strict policy of deletion of articles tagged as self-promotion or lack of relevance. "Ephemeral popular culture" (characters of TV series, TV programmes, etc.).A comparative study of the Fundación Colegio Libre de Eméritos Universitarios made by Prof. Arias Maldonado (University of Malaga) comparing some articles with those of the English and German Wikipedia concludes that the Spanish version of the Wikipedia is the least reliable of the three, more cumbersome and imprecise than the German and English Wikipedias, usually lacking reliable sources with many unreferenced data, and too dependent on online references.
During Wikimania 2009, free-software activist Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
criticized the Spanish Wikipedia for restricting links to the Rebelion.org
Rebelion.org
Rebelión is a nonprofit news site, started in Spain at the end of 1996 by a group of journalists. It contains scientific and opinion articles covering topics such as, current affairs, free knowledge, culture, ecology, economics, and resistance to globalization...
left-wing Web site and allegedly banning users who had complained about what had happened. Participants in the Spanish Wikipedia responded that Rebelion.org is primarily a news aggregator, that links to aggregators should be replaced with links to original publishers whenever possible, and that they considered the issue to be one of spam
Spam (electronic)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately...
.