Spanish Wikipedia

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Favicon of Wikipedia Spanish Wikipedia
Image:Wikipedia-logo-es.png

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. 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. 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.[1][2]

Contents

[edit] Key dates

[edit] 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[2][3], after the English Wikipedia. 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] As of November 2007, Spanish Wikipedia is the second Wikipedia in terms of traffic.[5]
  • 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[6]. 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.[7].
  • 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[8], 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%).[9]
  • 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).[10]

[edit] Criticism of the Spanish Wikipedia

 The references in this section may not meet Wikipedia's guidelines for reliable sources.
Please help by checking whether the references meet the criteria for reliable sources. Further discussion may be found on the talk page.
This article has been tagged since August 2007.
Progresive expanding of Spanish Wikipedia

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.

[edit] Use of Spanish Wikipedia

[edit] 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 only 0.26% in Basque.)[11]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Enciclopedia Libre Universal: Special Stats
  2. ^ a b Wikipedia: Special Stats
  3. ^ Alexa:Wikipedia Traffic Details
  4. ^ Wikipedia Statistics Tables - Articles over 2Kb
  5. ^ Alexa stats.
  6. ^ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votaciones/2004/Usar_s%C3%B3lo_im%C3%A1genes_libres
  7. ^ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Votaciones/2006/Cambiar_pol%C3%ADticas_y_reglas_de_uso_de_im%C3%A1genes
  8. ^ http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_de_estilo#Plantillas_de_navegaci.C3.B3n
  9. ^ Edits by project and country of origin as described in Meta.
  10. ^ Wikimedia Argentina (in Spanish).
  11. ^ Especial: Lenguas Oficiales en Wikipedia. Netsuus.com. Retrieved on 2007-07-26.

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Language editions of Wikipedia by number of articles
1,000,000+
500,000+
300,000+
Japanese ja: · Italian it: · Dutch nl: · Portuguese pt: · Spanish es:
100,000+
50,000+
10,000+
1,000+