The Spanish Wikipedia (Spanish: Wikipedia en espa�ol) is a Spanish-language edition

of Wikipedia, a free, online encyclopedia. It has 1,652,660 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 9th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles
and has the 4th-largest number of edits. Also ranks 10th in terms of depth among
Wikipedias.

Contents
1 History
2 Key dates
3 Size and users
3.1 Usage in Spain
4 Differences from other Wikipedias
5 Evaluation and criticism
6 References
7 Notes
8 External links
History
In February 2002, Larry Sanger wrote an e-mail to a mailing list stating that Bomis
was considering selling advertisements on Wikipedia. Edgar Enyedy, a user on the
Spanish Wikipedia, criticized the proposal. Jimmy Wales and Sanger responded by
saying that they did not immediately plan to implement advertisements,[1] but
Enyedy began establishing a fork. Enciclopedia Libre was established by February
26, 2002. Enyedy persuaded most of the Spanish Wikipedians into going to the fork.
By the end of 2002 over 10,000 articles were posted on the new site, and the
Spanish Wikipedia was inactive for the rest of the year. Andrew Lih wrote that "for
a long time it seemed that Spanish Wikipeda [sic] would be the unfortunate runt
left from the Spanish fork."[2] The general popularity of Wikipedia attracted new
users to the Spanish Wikipedia who were unfamiliar with the fork and these users
came by June 2003.[2][clarification needed] By the end of that year the Spanish
Wikipedia had over 10,000 articles. The size of the Spanish Wikipedia overtook that
of the fork in the northern hemisphere in the fall of 2004.[2]

Lih stated in 2009 that the concepts of advertising and forking were still
sensitive issues for the Wikipedia community because "It took more than a year for
the Spanish Wikipedia to get back on its feet again" after the fork had been
initiated.[2]

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.[citation needed] Both projects continue to
co-exist, but the Spanish Wikipedia is by far the more active of the two.[3][4]

Key dates

Historical article counts. The Spanish Wikipedia is shown in red; Enciclopedia

Libre is blue.
March 16, 2001: Jimmy Wales announced the internationalization of Wikipedia.[5]
May 11, 2001: The Spanish Wikipedia is established along with eight other wikis.
Its first domain was spanish.wikipedia.com.[6]
May 21, 2001: The oldest known article, Anexo:Pa�ses (English translation:
Countries of the world), is created.
February 26, 2002: many contributors left to form the Enciclopedia Libre Universal
en Espa�ol, rejecting perceived censorship and the possibility of advertising on
the Bomis-supported Wikipedia.[7]
October 23, 2002: the domain spanish.wikipedia.com is changed to es.wikipedia.org.
June 30, 2003: the mailing list for the Spanish Wikipedia is created (Wikies-l).[8]
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.[9]
August 24, 2006: three checkusers are elected.[10] They can examine IP addresses.
December 11, 2006: following a vote, the Arbitration Committee, whose local name is
Comit� de Resoluci�n de Conflictos (CRC) is created.[10]
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.[11]
March 25, 2009: the first oversighters are elected.[12] They can delete edits so
they cannot be seen even by regular administrators.
April 15, 2009: the Arbitration Committee is dissolved after a vote.[13]
May 16, 2013: the Spanish Wikipedia became the seventh Wikipedia to cross the
million article count.
January 20, 2019: the Spanish Wikipedia reaches the count of 1,500,000 articles.
Size and users

The countries in which the Spanish Wikipedia is the most popular language version
of Wikipedia are shown in red.
It has the second largest number of users, after the English Wikipedia.[14]
However, it is ranked eighth for number of articles, below other Wikipedias devoted
to languages with smaller numbers of speakers, such as German, French, Cebuano,
Dutch 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 2017, 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] Note
that a number of bots are hosted in the Netherlands.

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
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

The Spanish Wikipedia only accepts free images, and has rejected fair use since
2004, after a public vote.[9] 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 does not have an
Arbitration Committee. A local version was created in January 2007 (comprising
seven members, chosen by public vote),[10] and dissolved in 2009 after another
vote.[13]
Some templates, like the navigation templates,[21] have been deprecated, being the
only Wikipedia where it is forbidden to use these templates, instead relying on
categories that perform the same function.
Terminology in Spanish:
The equivalent to the English Wikipedia's featured articles and good articles are
art�culos destacados and art�culos buenos respectively.
Following a vote in August 2004, administrators in the Spanish Wikipedia took the
name of bibliotecarios (librarians). Other discarded options were usuarios
especiales (special users) or basureros (janitors).
Evaluation and criticism
A comparative study by the Colegio Libre de Em�ritos, made by Manuel Arias
Maldonado (University of Malaga) and published in 2010, compared some articles with
those of the English and German Wikipedias. It concluded that the Spanish version
of Wikipedia was the least reliable of the three. It found it to be more cumbersome
and imprecise than the German and English Wikipedias, stated that it often lacked
reliable sources, including much unreferenced data, and found it to be too
dependent on online references.[22]

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.[23]

According to a 2013 Oxford University study, five of the ten most disputed pages on
the Spanish Wikipedia were football (soccer) clubs, including Club Am�rica, FC
Barcelona, Athletic Bilbao, Alianza Lima, and Newell's Old Boys.[24]

References
Lih, Andrew. The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's
Greatest Encyclopedia. Hyperion, New York City. 2009. First Edition. ISBN 978-1-
4013-0371-6 (alkaline paper).
Notes
Lih, p. 137.
Lih, p. 138.
"Enciclopedia Libre Universal: Special Stats" (in Spanish). Enciclopedia.us.es.
Archived from the original on 2009-05-01. Retrieved 2012-06-18.
Estad�sticas
"Wikipedia mailing list message: Alternative language wikipedias".
Lists.wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 2014-06-20. Retrieved 2012-06-
18.
"[Wikipedia-l] new language wikis". wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on
2014-06-20. Retrieved 2011-03-27.
"Enciclopedia:Por qu� estamos aqu� y no en es.wikipedia.org" (in Spanish). 25 July
2007. Archived from the original on 12 April 2010. Retrieved 2 October 2010.
"[Wikies-l] Inauguracion de la lista". wikimedia.org. Archived from the original
on 2014-06-20. Retrieved 2011-03-27.
es:Wikipedia:Votaciones/2004/Usar s�lo im�genes libres
Votaciones/2006/Creaci�n del Comit� de resoluci�n de conflictos
Consultas de borrado/Plantilla:Esbozo
Supresores/Votaci�n/2009
Votaciones/2009/Sobre la disoluci�n del Comit� de Resoluci�n de Conflictos
"List of Wikipedias". wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 2017-08-30.
Retrieved 2012-12-27.
"Wikipedia Statistic