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.
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History
The Enciclopedia Libre was founded by contributors to the Spanish-language Wikipedia who decided to start an independent project. Led by Edgar Enyedy, they left Wikipedia on February 26, 2002, and created the new website, provided by the University of Seville for free, with the freely licensed articles of the Spanish-language Wikipedia.[1]
Reasons for the split
The reasons for the split are explained on Enciclopedia Libre.[2] Key issues included concerns about censorship and the possibility of advertising on Wikipedia. From the interview with Edgar Enyedy,[3] the main reasons for splitting at that time were:
- Perceived expectation that Wikipedia would soon start hosting advertisements.
- Non-English Wikipedias were running older, less featured versions of MediaWiki. When national groups offered help in software development and maintenance, access to the servers was denied.
- The downloadable database dumps of Wikipedia content were highly outdated.
- Wikipedia was hosted on .com rather than .org domain.
As later this situation improved, there was less necessity of forking and the project started to slow down.
Possibility of a merger
In October 2002, an effort led by Wikipedia editor Daniel Mayer (who goes by the username Maveric149) and others was made to reunite the projects, but the participants of Enciclopedia Libre voted against reunification before Wikipedia could offer a reunification proposal. The users of Enciclopedia Libre did, however, leave open the possibility for a future merger and expressed an interest in maintaining lines of communication.
Several talks have been made to make a merger. There also have been changes on Wikipedia and Enciclopedia Libre that may contribute to a merger:
- Creation of a non-profit Wikipedia organization, known as Wikimedia Foundation;
- Multilingual portal
- Installation of MediaWiki software on Enciclopedia Libre
Statistics
While Enciclopedia Libre initially grew much more rapidly than the Spanish Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia overtook it in 2004. Since then, the Spanish Wikipedia has grown at a much greater rate. As of October 2011, the Spanish Wikipedia hosts approximately eighteen times as many articles as Enciclopedia Libre.
Date | Approximate number of entries in Enciclopedia Libre | Approximate number of entries in Spanish Wikipedia |
---|---|---|
11 March 2002 | 3,036 | 1,300 |
2 April 2002 | 5,972 | 1,300 |
1 May 2002 | 7,540 | 1,400 |
27 May 2002 | 7,837 | 1,500 |
13 June 2002 | 8,125 | 1,500 |
13 July 2002 | 8,519 | |
4 August 2002 | 8,658 | 1,500 |
31 August 2002 | 8,996 | 1,500 |
3 October 2002 | 9,362 | 1,600 |
26 October 2002 | 10,258 | 1,900 |
17 June 2003 | 14,250 | 3,700 |
8 July 2003 | 14,428 | |
2 August 2003 | 14,662 | 4,600 |
6 September 2003 | 15,116 | 5,900 |
2 November 2003 | 15,572 | 8,900 |
6 December 2003 | 16,039 | 11,000 |
20 March 2004 | 19,688 | 19,000 |
6 November 2004 | 25,038 | 33,573 |
25 September 2005 | 28,709 | 66,984 |
27 February 2006 | 30,455 | 97,568 |
9 April 2006 | 30,776 | 108,012 |
3 July 2006 | 31,980 | 130,939 |
1 October 2006 | 33,367 | 157,061 |
3 January 2007 | 34,342 | 186,022 |
1 April 2007 | 34,551 | 218,690 |
1 July 2007 | 35,703 | 248,775 |
2 October 2007 | 36,860 | 283,630 |
1 January 2008 | 38,012 | 315,611 |
2 April 2008 | 39,478 | 348,217 |
4 July 2008 | 40,424 | 376,664 |
3 October 2008 | 41,096 | 403,280 |
1 January 2009 | 41,852 | 430,159 |
1 April 2009 | 42,366 | 458,301 |
1 July 2009 | 42,533 | 488,905 |
1 October 2009 | 43,035 | 516,333 |
1 January 2010 | 44,156 | 546,487 |
1 April 2010 | 44,592 | 581,486 |
1 July 2010 | 45,170 | 615,232 |
1 October 2010 | 45,947 | 653,596 |
1 January 2011 | 46,374 | 692,451 |
2 April 2011 | 46,775 | 745,694 |
3 July 2011 | 47,150 | 785,900 |
2 October 2011 | 47,315 | 832,243 |
1 January 2012 | 47,638 | 856,400 |
2 April 2012 | 47,797 | 880,230 |
Today | statistics | statistics |
Date | Approximate number of entries in Enciclopedia Libre | Approximate number of entries in Spanish Wikipedia |
See also
Other wiki and wiki-like encyclopedias:
- Susning.nu (Swedish)
- Hudong (Chinese)
- Baidu Baike (Chinese)
- List of online encyclopedias
References
- ^ Tkacz, Nathaniel (20 January 2011). "The Spanish Fork: Wikipedia's ad-fuelled mutiny". Wired UK. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-01/20/wikipedia-spanish-fork.
- ^ Enciclopedia: Por qué estamos aquí y no en es.wikipedia.org (Spanish)
- ^ Nathaniel Tkacz (2011) The Spanish Fork: Wikipedia's ad-fuelled mutiny
External links
- Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español
- User page of founder Edgar Enyedy at Enciclopedia Libre
- Alvarez, Carlos "Enciclopedias en Internet", El País (in Spanish)
- Edgar Enyedy's interview in Wired about the foundation of Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español
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