Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español

Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Espanol

Screenshot of Main Page on April 1, 2006
URL	enciclopedia.us.es
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Advertisement-free internet encyclopedia
Registration	Optional (although in some events unregistered users have to register to view and edit)
Available language(s)	Spanish
Content license	Creative Commons Attribution/ Share-Alike
Created by	Edgar Enyedy
Launched	February 26, 2002 (2002-02-26)

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

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.

Reasons for the split

The reasons for the split are explained on Enciclopedia Libre. Key issues included concerns about censorship and the possibility of advertising on Wikipedia. From the interview with Edgar Enyedy, 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.^{[citation needed]}
• The downloadable database dumps of Wikipedia content were highly outdated.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 (whose username is 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.^{[citation needed]} 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, so running the same wiki engine as Wikipedia.

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.

Historical article counts. The Spanish Wikipedia is shown in red; Enciclopedia Libre is blue.

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
2 July 2012	47,937	900,861
2 October 2012	48,082	924,293
1 January 2013	48,050	945,476
2 April 2013	48,238	981,012
Today	statistics	statistics
Date	Approximate number of entries in Enciclopedia Libre	Approximate number of entries in Spanish Wikipedia

See also

• Susning.nu (Swedish)
• Hudong (Chinese)
• Baidu Baike (Chinese)
• List of online encyclopedias

External links

• Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español
• User page of founder Edgar Enyedy at Enciclopedia Libre
• Alvarez, Carlos "Enciclopedias en Internet". El País. 29 December 2005. (in Spanish)
• Edgar Enyedy's interview in Wired about the foundation of Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español