Spanish language Wikipedia

Spanish language Wikipedia
La enciclopedia libre
Internet encyclopedia
languages	Spanish / Castilian
operator	Wikimedia Foundation
editorial staff	Wikipedia community
items	1,487,107
user	5,215,769
Registration	optional
On-line	May 2001 (currently active)
https://es.wikipedia.org/

The Spanish-language Wikipedia is the edition of Wikipedia in Spanish . It was launched in May 2001 as an extension of the multilingual project. On November 12, 2018, it had 1,487,107 articles and 5,215,769 registered users, of which 18,110 were particularly active. In terms of the number of articles, it is the eighth largest Wikipedia language version in November 2018.

history

→ Main article : Wikipedia

On March 16, 2001, Jimmy Wales announced its intention to internationalize Wikipedia by creating its own versions in different languages.

Almost two months later, on May 11, 2001, programmers Jason Richey and Toan Vo set up new wikis in various languages, including Spanish. Among the first articles are “Países del mundo” from May 21, 2001, 9:19 pm, also Ayuda: Cómo empezar una página, created one day later and “Informática” from May 25. At the end of the year, the number of articles was 220, including “Física de partículas”, “Don Quixote de la Mancha”, “Materia” and “Wiki” .

A few months later, in February 2002, the later rejected proposal to finance Wikipedia through advertising led to a disagreement among a large number of those who edited this version. Many of them left the project to join a spin-off called the Enciclopedia Libre . This incident probably played a role in the fact that proposals to finance Wikipedia with the help of advertising were subsequently rejected. However, Jimmy Wales says he has not completely discarded this idea.

In the aftermath of their split, activity on Spanish-language Wikipedia was very limited. In October 2002, after the update to "Phase III", the software that later became known as MediaWiki , the number of users increased again. In March 2006, the Spanish-language Wikipedia had developed to be by far the more active of the two competing projects. Many authors are currently working in both encyclopedias, with quite a few articles being transferred from Wikipedia to Enciclopedia Libre and vice versa, which is not a problem due to the compatible licenses.

In November 2003, in a vote in which terms such as "Librepedia", "Huiquipedia" and "Ñiquipedia" were discussed, the decision was made to keep the official name of the Spanish-language version "Wikipedia".

Milestones

72.4% of Wikipedia queries in Spain are directed to the Spanish language Wikipedia (in pink). Language versions of Wikipedia accessed in European countries, September 2009 - July 2010

Retrieved subject areas in the top 100 pages of the different language versions, 2009. In the Spanish-language Wikipedia, a relative focus is shown in the subject area science and technology.

For a long time it was the eighth largest language version of Wikipedia, measured by the number of articles available, until it was overtaken by the Portuguese version in May 2005. In August of the same year, the Italian-language Wikipedia overtook the Spanish-language one, with a bot that created 8,000 new articles - ironically, across all municipalities in Spain - provided the sudden lead. In April 2007 it overtook Wikipedia in Swedish and took ninth place in the ranking. On March 8, 2006 the Spanish language Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles, 200,000 on February 10, 2007 (less than a year later), 300,000 on November 18 of the same year, 400,000 on September 20, 2008, 500,000 on August 5, 2009, 600,000 on May 23, 2010 and 700,000 on January 12, 2011. As of March 13, 2009, it is the second Wikipedia to have more than one million users. On July 5th, 2009 the overhaul of Wikipedia in Portuguese was successful and thus the 8th place was regained. On July 7th of the same year, the Portuguese-language Wikipedia was able to briefly refer the Spanish-language Wikipedia to the places, but only kept this lead for a few hours. On June 7, 2010, Wikipedia in Spanish overtook the Dutch- language Wikipedia and took seventh place in relation to the number of articles available. The sixth place could then be conquered on March 22, 2011 through the overhaul of the Japanese-language Wikipedia. In November 2012, the Polish-language Wikipedia was overtaken, so that the sixth place was maintained. After the number of articles in the Dutch Wikipedia has grown rapidly since 2011 due to the use of bot , it overtook the Spanish-language Wikipedia again.

In the course of May 16, 2013, a bug in the Spanish-language Wikipedia was repaired and since then around 25,000 articles in the local namespace "Anexo:" have also been counted as articles for list articles. In other language versions there is no such namespace and list articles are automatically counted as normal articles. After this bug fix and the jump in the number of articles, it exceeded the million mark and overtook the Russian-language Wikipedia , placing it in 6th place behind the Italian-language Wikipedia .

According to a list by the server service Alexa , it was the fourth most visited Wikipedia version in December 2009.

Wikipedia guidelines

Wikipedia's guidelines are based on employee consensus and are based on five pillars:

• It is an encyclopedia .
• We write from a neutral point of view .
• The contents are free.
• It is assumed that the wikiquette is observed.
• There are no hard and fast rules.

The finding of a consensus usually results from the implementation of votes (votación), in which every registered employee who has a certain number of edits can take part. The rules thus found for the community are binding for all employees. There are also other issues that are decided by voting, including the deletion of certain articles.

An example of a guideline is the regulations on the use of images in the encyclopedia. From December 2004, the project decided to use only free images, just like on Wikimedia Commons . Protected images or restrictions on the further use of images (e.g. for the creation of new images or for commercial use) are not permitted in the Spanish-language Wikipedia, in contrast to the handling in other versions of the encyclopedia.

Another example is the Wikipedia naming conventions, according to which the article titles must be formed based on the most common use in Spanish. The use of regionalisms should be avoided so that every Spanish speaker can understand the article titles without difficulty. In the case of animal and plant species, in contrast to other Wikipedia, the scientific and not the vernacular name is used.

Employee

World map of the Spanish language Wikipedia, with countries from 10 (voluntarily) registered Wikipedians (October 2011)

Users from practically all Spanish-speaking countries are actively involved in Wikipedia in Spanish. More than 490 people are working on the project regularly - with more than 100 changes per month. In May 2010 the ten most changed articles included Venezuela , Mexico , Argentina , Colombia , Spain and Peru (in that order). A characteristic of the Spanish-language Wikipedia is its internationality. As of May 15, 2010, 6,865 permanent users from more than seventy countries were counted, including the twenty-one Spanish-speaking countries with the exception of Equatorial Guinea .

The employees or users are called usuario in the Spanish language Wikipedia . You don't have to register to be able to work on Wikipedia. The “anonymous” users can create new articles - which is not possible with the English language Wikipedia, for example - but they are not able to change the article titles. You cannot take part in votes, but you can take part in discussions. Edits of this user type are saved in the version history of each article , linked to the respective IP address , whereas changes by logged in Wikipedians are only registered under the respective user name.

Some actions and maintenance work in Wikipedia are reserved for a special group of users who have been called "bibliotecarios" in the Spanish version since 2004 (comparable to the administrators in the German Wikipedia) and who were previously also called administrators. Among other exclusive tasks, they have the ability to block users, make articles inaccessible for editing, and delete pages.

Apart from that, however, these users have no greater authority or decision-making power than any other user. Your actions must always conform to the rules given to themselves by the entire Wikipedian community. On April 10, 2011 there were 141 “bibliotecarios”, of which 83 had actively participated in the six months before. Among the Wikipedia versions with more than 100,000 articles, the Spanish-language Wikipedia was the version with the lowest number of administrators in relation to the number of registered users (~ 12,600 registered users per administrator).

Some employees (burócratas) are authorized to create user accounts for so-called bots, these are referred to as "bureaucrats" in the German language Wikipedia. These bot accounts are intended to facilitate or completely take over tasks that are often too tiring and monotonous for human employees. Examples are the automatic generation of reciprocal references to the articles in the other language versions or the correction of spelling errors.

Community consent is required for an account to be marked as a bot . On the other hand, users of the Spanish-language Wikipedia have repeatedly spoken out against the massive use of bots for the automatic production of mini-items, as occurs in other versions of Wikipedia, for example the Dutch and Swedish-speaking ones.

Unlike, for example, the English and French Wikipedia, the Spanish-language Wikipedia has long had no arbitration tribunal for the resolution of those conflicts that cannot be resolved by users and administrators using the normal arbitration process. In December 2006, after a vote (votación), a Comité de Resolución de Conflictos with seven elected members was set up and dissolved again after a vote in April 2009.

"Where is the Spanish-language Wikipedia edited from? (Status 2014) "
Spain			25.1%
Argentina			15.9%
Mexico			15.1%
Chile			9.0%
Colombia			7.7%
Peru			5.3%
Venezuela			4.5%
Ecuador			3.9%
Uruguay			1.8%
United States			1.7%
Rest			4.3%
From December 1 to 31, 2014 Source: Wikimedia

Criticism of the Spanish language Wikipedia

Edits of the Spanish language Wikipedia, representation of the localized editors on a world map (May 2011)

General criticism

See also : criticism of Wikipedia

The criticism of the Spanish-language Wikipedia is generally the same as the criticism that can be made of any other version of the project. Perhaps the most frequently lamented point of criticism relates to the basic idea of ​​every “Wiki” project: anyone can change, delete and add information to the encyclopedia. On the other hand, there are specific criticisms of the Spanish-language Wikipedia, which will be described in more detail below.

Small number of articles

Currently, the Spanish-language version of Wikipedia is the sixth largest based on the number of articles published. Many users wonder why, with such a large number of Spanish native speakers worldwide, the Spanish language Wikipedia contains fewer articles than, for example, the Dutch or Italian language versions, which can each have more articles. Is partly due to the fact that the Italian language Wikipedia as the Spanish-language by different Bot has grown for use in the Dutch Wikipedia is even more the case (see Dutch Wikipedia # use of bots ).

However, as explained above, the Spanish-language Wikipedia has managed to rise in the ranking of the quantitatively largest language versions since 2007.

In addition, Wikipedia in Spanish outperforms some other versions with a larger number of articles when other criteria are included, e.g. For example, the size of the database , the total number of words, the bytes per article, the percentage of articles with more than 500 bytes and more than 2 kilobytes.

According to the standard of Wikipedia article depth, i.e. the making of changes to an article that represents a rough guideline of the quality of a Wikipedia, the Spanish-language Wikipedia takes second place among the major language versions. Although the German, French, Italian and Polish language versions are currently larger, the articles on the Spanish-language Wikipedia are the result of a lively collaboration.

For these reasons, the standard for the presentation of the individual language versions was changed in 2008 according to the number of articles they contain. Since then, they have been ranked according to the number of hits, so that the Spanish-language Wikipedia takes second place.

Lack of reliability

In a study by the Colegio Libre de Eméritos Universitarios Foundation ("Free College of University Emeriti"), which was carried out in 2009 by Manuel Arias Maldonado at the University of Málaga , some articles on the Spanish, German and English language Wikipedia were compared with one another . According to his conclusions, the Spanish language Wikipedia was the most unreliable, the most difficult to understand and the most imprecise of the three versions. There is generally a lack of reliable sources, a lot of data without any indication of source, and most of it is based only on online sources.

Short duration of employee activity

According to a study carried out by the University of Rey Juan Carlos , the Spanish language Wikipedia, together with the English and Portuguese language Wikipedia, was the language version that most registered users had lost before they had worked for 500 days (around 70%).

Hispanization of place names

In the Spanish language Wikipedia there is the convention that the lemma for Spanish place names should only be their Spanish name ( Castellano ), regardless of what the official name is.

This convention is criticized by some users, and article titles are often changed, with the Spanish toponym being replaced by its counterpart in the language version that is officially valid in the respective region alongside the Castellano . Sometimes this means that the articles have to be temporarily blocked for editing. In this context, some critics point out that Wikipedia uses uncommon or even "invented" toponyms. However, the current convention, which was also drawn up by the Wikipedia community, also states that the versions of the place names used by the relevant regional language communities must be named in the article texts.

Item deletions

There is also criticism of the number of articles that are deleted according to the relevance criteria of Wikipedia or the ban on self-advertising.

Blocking other media

Another point of criticism of the free encyclopedia is that the possibility of redirecting to some web pages is blocked. This applies above all to the alternative information and news site rebelión.org, on which works by important authors such as Noam Chomsky , James Petras , José Saramago and Eduardo Galeano are published. The reasons for including this page in the blacklist of the Spanish-language Wikipedia are that articles are published on rebelion.org without regard to copyrights and that the website is regarded as a "non-neutral and verifiable source". During Wikimania 2009 Richard Stallman criticized this characteristic of Wikipedia in Spanish.

Wikimedia and neighboring projects

As a local section of the Wikimedia movement, “Wikimedia Argentina” was founded in Argentina on September 1, 2007, and the “Wikimedia España” association has existed in Spain since February 7, 2011. There are also national Wikimedia associations (so-called chapters ) in Mexico, Chile and Venezuela.

Wikimedia España is also intended to promote the Catalan language Wikipedia (593,453 articles). Other neighboring projects are the Wikipedia language versions in Basque (202,899), Galician (116,731), Aragonese (30,215), Asturian (19,745), Extremadurian (2,418), Mirandés (2,190) or Ladino (3,324).

Web links

Wikipedia in Spanish

Commons : Spanish language Wikipedia  collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Wikipedias ordered by size , Wikimedia.org, accessed November 11, 2018
2. ↑ Message in the Wikipedia mailing list: Alternative language wikipedias (English)
3. ↑ Wikipedia-1; new language wikis , message from Jason Richey (May 11, 2001)
4. ↑ Países del mundo
5. ↑ en: Wikipedia: Multilingual ranking December 2001
6. ^ Rhys Blakely: Wikipedia chief considers taking ads Times Online December 30, 2005; Time Magazine: Jimmy Wales on Advertisements in 2008 ; 10 Questions for Jimmy Wales on January 14, 2011.
7. ↑ Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Wikipedia Page Views Per Country - This analysis is based on a 1: 1000 sampled server log (squids). Period 04/2010 - 03/2011
8. ↑ Small tensions between the Italian and Spanish Wikipedia : Elian in the Wikipedia courier on August 20, 2005.
9. ^ Announcement of the reason for the sudden jump in the number of articles on the wikimedia-l public mailing list on May 17, 2013.
10. ↑ meta: List of Wikipedias / Table : Change in the number of articles on May 16, 2013.
11. ↑ Estadísticas de wikipedia.org according to alexa.com
12. ↑ Report from the Spanish Wikipedia by Titoxd, Wikipedia signpost, August 28, 2006, Wikipedia: Votaciones / 2004 / Usar sólo imágenes libres , Wikipedia: Votaciones / 2006 / Cambiar políticas y reglas de uso de imágenes
13. ↑ Lista de wikipedistas ordenados por el número de ediciones
14. ^ Mapa de wikipedistas
15. ↑ stats.wikimedia.org
16. ↑ Artículos más editados
17. ↑ Wikipedistas por país
18. ↑ Archive of Admin nominations (June 2004 - September 2004); Archive of the candidacies for the "Bibliotecario" (from September 2004)
19. ^ Bibliotecarios
20. ↑ Estadísticas de Wikipedia (Wikipedia statistics)
21. ↑ Creación del Comité de resolución de conflictos , Spanish-language Wikipedia, December 2006. Sobre la disolución del Comité de Resolución de Conflictos , Spanish-language Wikipedia, April 2009.
22. ↑ Wikipedia statistics: extent of the database (Spanish)
23. ↑ Wikipedia statistics: total number of words (Spanish)
24. ↑ Wikipedia statistics: average number of bytes per article (Spanish)
25. ↑ Wikipedia statistics: Articles with more than 500 bytes (English)
26. ↑ Wikipedia statistics: Articles with more than 2 kB (English)
27. ↑ List of Wikipedias with detailed statistics in the Meta-Wiki (English)
28. ↑ List of Wikipedias (Spanish)
29. ↑ Compare Monthly page views for Wikipedia , as you can see on the homepage of the Wikipedia wikis .
30. ↑ Wikipedia: un estudio comparado (Spanish) (PDF; 269 kB) Professor Manuel Arias Maldonado (University of Málaga), Colegio Libre de Eméritos, Madrid, 2009
31. ↑ José Felipe Ortega Soto: Wikipedia: A Quantitative Analysis ( Memento of April 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
32. ↑ see Spanish place names
33. ↑ Wikipedia y los topónimos (Spanish)
34. ↑ ¿Quién merece estar en la Wikipedia? (Spanish). News in the daily newspaper Público.
35. ↑ La Wikipedia bloquea una web de información alternativa ( Memento of the original of July 16, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Spanish) 
36. ↑ Noam Cohen: A War of Words over Wikipedia's Spanish Version. In: New York Times Blog. Bits. August 27, 2009.
37. ↑ ¡Feliz cumpleaños, Wikimedia Argentina! ( Memento of the original from November 14, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Boletín informativo - September 2010. 
38. ^ Wikimedia Foundation Approval of Wikimedia Spain. February 7, 2011; Wikimedia España confirmada e inscrita en el Registro Nacional de Asociaciones del Ministerio del Interior el 15 de April 2011 .
39. ↑ Overview of the regional associations of the Wikimedia Foundation