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Spanish Wikipedia

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Spanish Wikipedia

The Main Page of the Spanish Wikipedia.
URL	http://es.wikipedia.org/
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Internet encyclopedia project
Registration	Optional
Available language(s)	Spanish
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation

The Spanish Wikipedia (Spanish: Wikipedia en español) is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia. It has over 624,000 articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently, it is the 7th largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, having surpassed Dutch Wikipedia on June 7, 2010. Long before it had been the 6th largest edition of Wikipedia, until the Portuguese language Wikipedia overtook it in May 2005 and the Italian edition in August 2005. 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. It currently has 623,770 articles.

Key dates

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (September 2008)

• May 1, 2001: The Spanish Wikipedia is established.
• June 30, 2003: The mailing list for the Spanish Wikipedia is created (Wikies-I).
• July 18, 2004: The Spanish edition switches to UTF-8, allowing any character to be used directly in forms.
• September 1, 2007: first local chapter of Wikimedia Foundation is created in a Spanish-speaking country (Argentina).

Features

• The Spanish Wikipedia was among the five first wikipedias to be created (see Wikipedia:Multilingual monthly statistics (2001)).
• The Spanish Wikipedia has the second largest population of users, after the English Wikipedia. However, it is ranked eighth 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, Polish, Japanese, Dutch 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.
• 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).
• The Spanish Wikipedia only accepts free images, and has rejected fair use 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 Commons 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.
• The equivalent to the English Wikipedia's featured articles and good articles are artículos destacados and artículos buenos respectively.
• Some templates, like the navigation templates, or the presentation of the geographical coordinates next to the article's title have been deprecated.
• 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 is at the moment the only one that has established a local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation (as of September 1, 2007).
• 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.

Criticism

One of the issues that causes more 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), promotion of not-so-known people (unknown singers, one-book writers, bloggers, etc) are thought to be more tolerated in other wikipedias.

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 much dependent on online references.

Use of Spanish Wikipedia

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.)

References

External links

Spanish Wikipedia edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• (Spanish) Spanish Wikipedia