Spanish Wikipedia

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 This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the Spanish Wikipedia. (August 2011)
Favicon of Wikipedia Spanish Wikipedia
Wikipedia-logo-v2-es.svg
Spanish Wikipedia.png
The Main Page of the Spanish Wikipedia in January 2012
Web address es.wikipedia.org
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 has 1,023,908 articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006 and 1,000,000 articles on May 16, 2013. It is the 6th largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles. On May 17, 2013 the Spanish Wikipedia reached one million articles.

In February 2003, 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]

Contents

Key dates[edit]

  • 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]
Historical article counts. The Spanish Wikipedia is shown in red; Enciclopedia Libre is blue.
  • May 16 2013 , the Spanish Wikipedia became the seventh Wikipedia to cross the million article count.


Size and users[edit]

Origin of edits (1 Nov 2011 – 31 Oct 2012) Source
Spain
  
 32.7%
Argentina
  
 13.6%
Mexico
  
 13.4%
Chile
  
 9.3%
Colombia
  
 7.7%
Peru
  
 4.3%
Venezuela
  
 3.3%
Uruguay
  
 2.5%
United States
  
 2.0%
Ecuador
  
 1.9%
Other
  
 9.3%
The countries in which the Spanish Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in blue.[13]

It has the second largest number of users, after the English Wikipedia.[14] However, it is ranked seventh for number of articles, below other Wikipedias devoted to languages with smaller numbers of speakers, such as German, French, Dutch, Italian and Russian. 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.[15] As of October 2012, Spanish Wikipedia is the fourth Wikipedia in terms of the number of edits, [16] as well as the third Wikipedia by the number of page views.[17]

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%).[18]

Among the countries where Spanish is an official language, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela have established local chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Usage in Spain[edit]

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)[19]

Differences from other Wikipedias[edit]

  • 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.[20]
  • 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,[21] 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).
  • There is no autoconfirmation, in order to move pages and edit semi protected articles, one must request for these permissions, much like, requests for adminship on the English Wikipedia [22]

Criticism[edit]

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.[23]

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.[24]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Enciclopedia Libre Universal: Special Stats" (in (Spanish)). Enciclopedia.us.es. Retrieved 2012-06-18. 
  2. ^ "Wikipedia: Special Stats" (in (Spanish)). Es.wikipedia.org. Retrieved 2012-06-18. 
  3. ^ "Wikipedia mailing list message: Alternative language wikipedias". Lists.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2012-06-18. 
  4. ^ Wikipedia-l; new language wikis, Jason Richey message in Wikipedia mailing list on May 11, 2001.
  5. ^ "Enciclopedia:Por qué estamos aquí y no en es.wikipedia.org" (in Spanish). 2007-07-25. Retrieved 2 October 2010. 
  6. ^ First message in the Wikies-l mailing list dated June 30, 2003.
  7. ^ a b Votaciones/2004/Usar sólo imágenes libres, Spanish Wikipedia
  8. ^ Candidaturas a Checkusers, Spanish Wikipedia (2006)
  9. ^ Votaciones/2006/Creación del Comité de resolución de conflictos, Spanish Wikipedia
  10. ^ Consulta de borrado/Plantilla:Esbozo, Spanish Wikipedia (2008)
  11. ^ Supervisor/Votación, Spanish Wikipedia (2009)
  12. ^ Votaciones/2009/Sobre la disolución del Comité de Resolución de Conflictos, Spanish Wikipedia
  13. ^ Erik Zachte (14 November 2011). "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Wikipedia Page Views Per Country - Trends". Wikimedia Statistics. Retrieved 19 January 2011. 
  14. ^ List of Wikipedias
  15. ^ "Wikipedia Statistics Tables - Articles over 2Kb". Stats.wikimedia.org. Retrieved 2012-06-18. 
  16. ^ Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Page Edits Per Wikipedia Language - Breakdown
  17. ^ [1]
  18. ^ Edits by project and country of origin as described in Meta.
  19. ^ "Especial: Lenguas Oficiales en Wikipedia". Netsuus.com. Archived from the original on 2007-09-30. Retrieved 2007-07-26. 
  20. ^ Votaciones/2006/Cambiar políticas y reglas de uso de imágenes, Spanish Wikipedia
  21. ^ Plantillas de navegación, Spanish Wikipedia
  22. ^ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Usuarios_confirmados
  23. ^ Manuel Arias Maldonado. "Wikipedia: un estudio comparado" (in Spanish). p. 49. Retrieved 2010-06-16. 
  24. ^ Cohen, Noam (August 27, 2009). "A War of Words Over Wikipedia’s Spanish Version". The New York Times. Retrieved 2009-10-27. 

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Spanish Wikipedia
Spanish Wikipedia edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of Wikipedias by article count
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Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_Wikipedia&oldid=560002607"