The Main Page of the Spanish Wikipedia. |
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URL | es.wikipedia.org |
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Commercial? | No |
Type of site | Internet encyclopedia project |
Registration | Optional |
Available language(s) | Spanish |
Owner | Wikimedia Foundation |
Launched | May 11, 2001 |
The Spanish Wikipedia (Spanish: Wikipedia en español) is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia. It currently has 885,718 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.[1][2]
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Key dates
- March 16, 2001: Jimmy Wales announced the internationalization of Wikipedia.[3]
- May 11, 2001: The Spanish Wikipedia is established along with eight other wikis. Its first domain was Spanish.wikipedia.com.[4]
- 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[5].
- 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).[6]
- October 6, 2003: first bot created on this Wikipedia. Its user name is SpeedyGonzalez.
- July 18, 2004: the Spanish edition switches to UTF-8, allowing any character to be used directly in forms.
- December 9, 2004: it is decided that Wikipedia in Spanish will use free images only.[7]
- August 24, 2006: three checkusers are elected.[8] They can examine IP addresses.
- December 11, 2006: following a vote, the Arbitration Committee, whose local name is Comité de Resolución de Conflictos (CRC) is created.[9]
- June 11, 2007: last local image was erased, so all media are retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
- September 1, 2007: first local chapter of Wikimedia Foundation is created in a Spanish-speaking country (Argentina).
- December 13, 2008: it was decided to eliminate the stub template from Spanish Wikipedia.[10]
- March 25, 2009: the first oversighters are elected.[11] They can delete edits so they cannot be seen by regular administrators.
- April 15, 2009: the Arbitration Committee is dissolved after a vote.[12]
Size and users
It has the second largest population of users,[2][13] after the English Wikipedia. However, it is ranked fifth for number of articles, below other Wikipedias devoted to languages with smaller numbers of speakers, such as 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.[14] As of November 2007, Spanish Wikipedia is the second Wikipedia in terms of traffic.[15]
By 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%).[16]
Among the countries where Spanish is an official language, Argentina and Spain have established local chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation. They were founded on 1 September 2007 and 11 February 2011 respectively.[17]
Usage in Spain
Following a study by Netsuus (online market analysis enterprises) on the use of Wikipedia in Spain, it was revealed that most users consult Spanish Wikipedia (97%) compared to wikipedias in other regional languages (2.17% for Wikipedia in Catalan, 0.64% in Galician and 0.26% in Basque.)[18]
Differences from other Wikipedias
- The Spanish Wikipedia only accepts free images, and has rejected fair use since 2004, after a public vote.[7] In 2006, it was decided to phase out the use of local image uploads and to exclusively use Wikimedia Commons for images and other media in the future.[19]
- Unlike the French and English Wikipedias, the Spanish Wikipedia did not have an Arbitration Committee until January 2007. It comprises seven members, chosen by public vote.
- Some templates, like the navigation templates,[20] and 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
A comparative study by the Fundación Colegio Libre de Eméritos Universitarios, made by Prof. Arias Maldonado (University of Malaga) and published in 2010, comparing some articles with those of the English and German Wikipedia, concludes that the Spanish version of 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.[21]
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.[22]
References
- ^ Enciclopedia Libre Universal: Special Stats
- ^ a b Wikipedia: Special Stats
- ^ Wikipedia mailing list message: Alternative language wikipedias
- ^ Wikipedia-l; new language wikis, Jason Richey message in Wikipedia mailing list on May 11, 2001.
- ^ "Enciclopedia:Por qué estamos aquí y no en es.wikipedia.org" (in Spanish). 2007-07-25. http://enciclopedia.us.es/index.php/Enciclopedia:Por_qu%C3%A9_estamos_aqu%C3%AD_y_no_en_es.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 2 October 2010.
- ^ First message in the Wikies-l mailing list dated June 30, 2003.
- ^ a b Votaciones/2004/Usar sólo imágenes libres, Spanish Wikipedia
- ^ Candidaturas a Checkusers, Spanish Wikipedia (2006)
- ^ Votaciones/2006/Creación del Comité de resolución de conflictos, Spanish Wikipedia
- ^ Consulta de borrado/Plantilla:Esbozo, Spanish Wikipedia (2008)
- ^ Supervisor/Votación, Spanish Wikipedia (2009)
- ^ Votaciones/2009/Sobre la disolución del Comité de Resolución de Conflictos, Spanish Wikipedia
- ^ Alexa:Wikipedia Traffic Details
- ^ Wikipedia Statistics Tables - Articles over 2Kb
- ^ Alexa stats.
- ^ Edits by project and country of origin as described in Meta.
- ^ Wikimedia Argentina (in Spanish).
- ^ "Especial: Lenguas Oficiales en Wikipedia". Netsuus.com. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. http://web.archive.org/web/20070930165043/http://www.netsuus.com/informe-breve/especial-wikipedia. Retrieved 2007-07-26.
- ^ Votaciones/2006/Cambiar políticas y reglas de uso de imágenes, Spanish Wikipedia
- ^ Plantillas de navegación, Spanish Wikipedia
- ^ Manuel Arias Maldonado. "Wikipedia: un estudio comparado" (in Spanish). pp. 49. http://www.colegiodeemeritos.es/docs/repositorio//es_ES//documentos/wikipedia_un_estudio_comparado_%28vf%29.pdf. Retrieved 2010-06-16.
- ^ Cohen, Noam (August 27, 2009). "A War of Words Over Wikipedia’s Spanish Version". The New York Times. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/a-war-of-words-over-wikipedias-spanish-version/. Retrieved 2009-10-27.
External links
- (Spanish) Spanish Wikipedia mobile version
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