Spanish Wikipedia

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Spanish Wikipedia is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Started in May 2001, this edition reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006. Currently it is the 10th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles. It was the 8th-biggest edition of Wikipedia for a long time, until the Portuguese language Wikipedia overtook it in May 2005 and the Italian edition in August 2005.

In February 2002, most 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. Because of this incident, all later proposals of financing Wikipedia through advertising have been quickly and firmly rejected by Wikipedia leader Jimbo Wales.

After the fork, 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 of the two projects continue to co-exist, but as of late 2005, the Spanish Wikipedia seems to be by far the more active of them.

[edit] Key dates

June 30, 2003: The mailing list for the Spanish Wikipedia is created (Wikies-I).
July 25, 2003: 5,000 article milestone.
October 6, 2003: The first bot (SpeedyGonzalez) is used on the Spanish edition.
November 4, 2003: 10,000 article milestone.
July 18, 2004: The Spanish edition switches to UTF-8, allowing any character to be used directly in forms.
May 30, 2005: 50,000 article milestone.
March 8, 2006: 100,000 article milestone.
September 6, 2006: 150,000 article milestone.