SPANISH WIKIPEDIA

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The 'Spanish Wikipedia' (Spanish: ''Wikipedia en español'') is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently, it is the 9th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles, having surpassed Swedish Wikipedia in April 2007. Long before it had been the 8th-biggest edition of Wikipedia, until the Portuguese language Wikipedia overtook it in May 2005 and the Italian edition in August 2005. As of August 1, 2007, it had more than 260,000 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 the more active of the two ^[1][2].

Contents

Key dates

Features

Criticism of the Spanish Wikipedia

Use of Spanish Wikipedia

Spain

References

External links

Key dates

★ May 1, 2001: The Spanish Wikipedia is established.

★ June 30, 2003: The mailing list for the Spanish Wikipedia is created (Wikies-I).

★ July 25, 2003: 5,000th article is created.

★ November 4, 2003: 10,000th article is created.

★ July 18, 2004: The Spanish edition switches to UTF-8, allowing any character to be used directly in forms.

★ May 30, 2005: 50,000th article is created.

★ March 8, 2006: 100,000th article is created.

★ September 6, 2006: 150,000th article is created.

★ February 10, 2007: 200,000th article is created.

★ July 4, 2007: 250,000th article is created.

Features

★ The Spanish Wikipedia was among the five first wikipedias to be created (see ).

★ The Spanish Wikipedia has the second largest population of users^[3], after the Wikipedia in English, and was the second one to be established. However it is ranked ninth 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, Italian and Portuguese. 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.^[4]

★ Following a 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^[5]. 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.^[6].

★ Unlike the French and English Wikipedias, the Spanish Wikipedia did not have an ; 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 and are '' and '' respectively.

★ Unlike other Wikipedias, such as the Italian or Portuguese, the Spanish Wikipedia community shows a strong reluctance to use to automatically create thousands of articles dumping statistical data into articles related to items such as municipalities or asteroids.

★ Deletion of articles is ruled by public vote. A 3 to 1 is needed to delete an article.

★ Some templates, like the navigation templates^[7], 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%).^[8]

★ 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 1st 2007).^[9]

Criticism of the Spanish Wikipedia

One of the issues that causes more controversy amongst editors is the strict policy of deletion of articles tagged as or . In spite of the fact that a vote has to be conducted to actually delete an article and that a 3 to 1 is needed, these deletions, and even the votes, are normally surrounded by a lot of unrest since "ephimerous 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, causing the authors of such articles in Spanish Wikipedia to complain bitterly. Some of them even create blogs or publish articles in blogs to air their discomfort with this policy. ^[10][11]

Use of Spanish Wikipedia

Spain

Following a study by ''Netsuus'' and ''OJOBuscador'' (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 only 0.26% in Basque.)^[12]

References

1. Enciclopedia Libre Universal: Special Stats
2. Wikipedia: Special Stats
3. Alexa:Wikipedia Traffic Details
4. Wikipedia Statistics Tables - Articles over 2Kb
5. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votaciones/2004/Usar_s%C3%B3lo_im%C3%A1genes_libres
6. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votaciones/2006/Cambiar_pol%C3%ADticas_y_reglas_de_uso_de_im%C3%A1genes
7. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_de_estilo#Plantillas_de_navegaci.C3.B3n
8. .
9. Wikimedia Argentina (in Spanish).
10. Blogueros contra wikipedistas (Translation: Bloggers against Wikipedians)
11. Los dictadores de Wikipedia (Translation: Wikipedia dictators)
12. Las ediciones autonómicas de la Wikipedia reciben muy pocas consultas

External links

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