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Favicon of Wikipedia Spanish Wikipedia
85%
Screenshot
Main Page of the Spanish Wikipedia in April 2021
Type of site
Internet encyclopedia project
Available inSpanish
HeadquartersMiami, Florida
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
URLes.wikipedia.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
Launched11 May 2001; 23 years ago (2001-05-11)
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution/
Share-Alike 4.0 (most text also dual-licensed under GFDL)
Media licensing varies

The Spanish Wikipedia (Spanish: Wikipedia en español) is the Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has 1,996,369 articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on 8 March 2006, and 1,000,000 articles on 16 May 2013. It is the 8th-largest Wikipedia as measured by the number of articles and has the 4th-most edits. It also ranks 28th in terms of article depth among Wikipedias.

Academic studies have indicated that the Spanish Wikipedia is less reliable than the English and German Wikipedias, as well as more prone to disinformation from Russian government outlets. It has also been criticized for whitewashing left-wing authoritarian regimes such as Cuba's and for allowing damaging disinformation about living people who are critical of the left.

History

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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 26 February 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 last months 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.[clarification needed][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

[edit]
Historical article counts. The Spanish Wikipedia is shown in red; Enciclopedia Libre is blue.
  • 16 March 2001: Jimmy Wales announced the internationalization of Wikipedia.[5]
  • 11 May 2001: The Spanish Wikipedia is established along with eight other wikis. Its first domain was spanish.wikipedia.com.[6]
  • 21 May 2001: The oldest known article, Anexo:Países (English translation: Countries of the world), is created.
  • 26 February 2002: many contributors left to form the Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español, rejecting perceived censorship and the possibility of advertising on the Bomis-supported Wikipedia.[7]
  • 23 October 2002: the domain spanish.wikipedia.com is changed to es.wikipedia.org.
  • 30 June 2003: the mailing list for the Spanish Wikipedia is created (Wikies-l).[8]
  • 6 October 2003: first bot created on this Wikipedia. Its user name is SpeedyGonzalez.
  • 18 July 2004: the Spanish edition switches to UTF-8, allowing any character to be used directly in forms.
  • 9 December 2004: it is decided that Wikipedia in Spanish will use free images only.[9]
  • 24 August 2006: three checkusers are elected.[10] They can examine IP addresses.
  • 11 December 2006: following a vote, the Arbitration Committee, whose local name is Comité de Resolución de Conflictos (CRC) is created.[10]
  • 11 June 2007: last local image was erased, so all media are retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
  • 1 September 2007: first local chapter of Wikimedia Foundation is created in a Spanish-speaking country (Argentina).
  • 13 December 2008: it was decided to eliminate the stub template from Spanish Wikipedia.[11]
  • 25 March 2009: the first oversighters are elected.[12] They can delete edits such that they cannot be seen by regular administrators.
  • 15 April 2009: the Arbitration Committee is dissolved after a vote.[13]
  • 16 May 2013: the Spanish Wikipedia became the seventh Wikipedia to cross the million article count.
  • 20 January 2019: the Spanish Wikipedia reaches the count of 1,500,000 articles.

Size and users

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Active editors by country
Country percent
 Spain
 
 29.7%
 Mexico
 
 13.4%
 Argentina
 
 11.5%
 Colombia
 
 7.4%
 Peru
 
 7.3%
 Chile
 
 7.0%
 Ecuador
 
 1.9%
 United States
 
 1.8%
 Uruguay
 
 1.8%
 Costa Rica
 
 1.3%
Other
 
 17.0%
October 2021
Source: Wikimedia Statistics
- Page Edits Per Wikipedia Language - Breakdown
The countries in which the Spanish Wikipedia is the most popular language version of Wikipedia are shown in yellow.
Page views by country of origin on the Spanish Wikipedia

It has the second most users, after the English Wikipedia, and the fourth most active users, after the English, French and German Wikipedias.[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 2009, the percentage of articles whose size was above 2 KB was 40%, placing the Spanish Wikipedia as the second out of the ten largest Wikipedias after the German one.[15] As of October 2012, the Spanish Wikipedia was the fourth Wikipedia in terms of the number of edits.[16] As of September 2024, it is the fifth Wikipedia by the number of page views, behind the English, Japanese, Russian and German Wikipedias.[17]

By country of origin, by September 2017, Spain was the main contributor to the Spanish Wikipedia (39.2% of edits). It was 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 either an official language or a de facto national language, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Spain and Venezuela have established local chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Usage in Spain

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Following a 2007 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][clarification needed]

Differences from other Wikipedias

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  • 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:
  • In 2023, after a community vote that lasted from August 1 to August 15, the Spanish Wikipedia enabled a bot policy using ORES that reverts edits to rate good faith edits using the y-parameters provided by the platform available under MIT License.

Evaluation and criticism

[edit]

Academic studies

[edit]

A comparative study by the Colegio Libre de Eméritos, made by Manuel Arias Maldonado (University of Málaga) 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]

According to a 2013 Oxford University study, five of the ten most disputed pages on the Spanish Wikipedia were football (soccer) clubs, including Club América, FC Barcelona, Athletic Bilbao, Alianza Lima, and Newell's Old Boys.[23]

In a study published in 2017, seventy-seven university students, most with Catalan and/or Spanish as their native languages, made contributions to the English, Spanish and Catalan Wikipedias as part of assessed work and responded to questionaries.[24] The students preferred the English Wikipedia when looking for general information despite the fact that English was the language they reported being less proficient at: "In many of the open comments on the differences between language editions, the students suggested that the English version was better, more complete or more reliable." Specifically, the participants were asked the following question: "If an article is available in Catalan, Spanish and English, which version are you most likely to read first?" The majority responded that they read articles in English first. The researchers wrote that "the English version was seen by many of the students as the main reference page, and they stated that they used it ‘by default’," and highlighted that "the students responded to this question after having written a Wikipedia article and undergoing the process of publishing it (and thus of the strict peer review curation of the Wikipedia community of volunteers)."

Rebelion.org

[edit]

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 on 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.[25]

Pro-Russian disinformation

[edit]

In April 2022, the European Union's East StratCom Task Force found that four pro-Russian disinformation news outlets were referenced in 52 articles of the Spanish Wikipedia, which was the third Wikipedia edition most affected by such disinformation, behind the Russian and Arabic Wikipedias.[26] They wrote:

On the English version of Wikipedia, there seems to be a consensus that state-sponsored disinformation sites aren't legitimate sources [...]. One can only guess whether other language versions will follow suit, but there is nothing stopping anyone from launching that debate, pointing out the English Wikipedia example as a best practice.

Political bias

[edit]

The Spanish Wikipedia has been criticized for offering a whitewashed coverage of left-wing politician Cristina Kirchner while presenting a negative portrayal of her center-right opponent Mauricio Macri.[27][28][29][30] The May 2020 article in La Nación emphasized that, even though Argentine newspaper Clarín had published an article six months prior (November 2019) highlighting these political biases and their objectionable nature, the Spanish Wikipedia had not corrected the reported problems, no matter how much it says of itself that incorrect information "is quickly corrected".[28]

In March 2021, Argentine historian Luis Alberto Romero criticized the Wikipedia Argentina chapter in Clarín.[31] He described how hundreds of articles on the history of Argentina were manipulated "with the classic taste of the K narrative" in the Spanish Wikipedia. He blamed those on the top of the Spanish Wikipedia hierarchy, who can "accept or reject the collaborations" and who "since 2009 are crowded by a group of Kirschnerist militants".

In June 2022, Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional observed that the Spanish Wikipedia describes the United Socialist Party of Venezuela as "a political party with socialist, anticapitalist, antiimperialist and internationalist ideology, which takes as its principles Simon Bolivar's work, scientific socialism, Christianism and liberation theology." El Nacional then observed that the Spanish Wikipedia article omits that the party's goal has been to turn into the only existing political organization in Venezuela.[32]

In July 2022, an article in Infobae criticized the Spanish Wikipedia for using euphemisms to describe Cuba's political system to avoid a clear characterization as a dictatorship.[33] The author ridicules the Spanish Wikipedia for claiming that Cuba is "similar to other states with parliamentary forms of government" and that its National Assembly "consists of representatives that are elected by universal, free, direct and secret vote" by Cubans every five years.

In September 2022, a manifesto signed by Juan Carlos Girauta, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Joaquín Leguina, Albert Rivera, Daniel Lacalle, Lucía Etxebarría, Félix de Azúa, Francisco Sosa Wagner, Cristina Ayala, Miriam Tey and Toni Cantó among others was published denouncing political bias on the Spanish Wikipedia.[34][35] They also denounced that the Spanish Wikipedia refuses to correct false claims, including some that are damaging to living persons.[36][37]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ Lih, p. 137.
  2. ^ a b c d Lih, p. 138.
  3. ^ "Enciclopedia Libre Universal: Special Stats" (in Spanish). Enciclopedia.us.es. Archived from the original on 1 May 2009. Retrieved 18 June 2012.
  4. ^ Estadísticas
  5. ^ "Wikipedia mailing list message: Alternative language wikipedias". Lists.wikimedia.org. 16 March 2001. Archived from the original on 20 June 2014. Retrieved 18 June 2012.
  6. ^ "[Wikipedia-l] new language wikis". wikimedia.org. 11 May 2001. Archived from the original on 20 June 2014. Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  7. ^ "Enciclopedia:Por qué estamos aquí y no en es.wikipedia.org" (in Spanish). 25 July 2007. Archived from the original on 12 April 2010. Retrieved 2 October 2010.
  8. ^ "[Wikies-l] Inauguracion de la lista". wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 20 June 2014. Retrieved 27 March 2011.
  9. ^ a b es:Wikipedia:Votaciones/2004/Usar sólo imágenes libres
  10. ^ a b c Votaciones/2006/Creación del Comité de resolución de conflictos
  11. ^ Consultas de borrado/Plantilla:Esbozo
  12. ^ Supresores/Votación/2009
  13. ^ a b Votaciones/2009/Sobre la disolución del Comité de Resolución de Conflictos
  14. ^ "List of Wikipedias". wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 30 August 2017. Retrieved 25 August 2024.
  15. ^ "Wikipedia Statistics Tables - Articles over 2Kb". Stats.wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 14 June 2012. Retrieved 18 June 2012.
  16. ^ "Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report - Page Edits Per Wikipedia Language - Breakdown". wikimedia.org. Archived from the original on 8 November 2011. Retrieved 16 April 2012.
  17. ^ "Vital Signs: Pageviews". Wikimedia. Retrieved 6 September 2024.
  18. ^ Edits by project and country of origin as described in Meta.
  19. ^ "Especial: Lenguas Oficiales en Wikipedia". Netsuus.com. Archived from the original on 30 September 2007. Retrieved 26 July 2007.
  20. ^ es:Wikipedia:Votaciones/2006/Cambiar políticas y reglas de uso de imágenes
  21. ^ es:Wikipedia:Plantillas de navegación
  22. ^ Manuel Arias Maldonado. "Wikipedia: un estudio comparado" (PDF) (in Spanish). p. 49. Archived (PDF) from the original on 19 June 2010. Retrieved 16 June 2010.
  23. ^ Gross, Doug. "Wiki wars: The 10 most controversial Wikipedia pages Archived 2016-04-12 at the Wayback Machine." (Archive) CNN. July 24, 2013. Retrieved on July 26, 2013.
  24. ^ Soler-Adillon, Joan; Freixa, Pere (15 December 2017). "Wikipedia access and contribution: Language choice in multilingual communities. A case study". Anàlisi (57): 63–80. doi:10.5565/rev/analisi.3109. hdl:10230/33516.
  25. ^ Cohen, Noam (August 27, 2009). "A War of Words Over Wikipedia's Spanish Version". The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 5, 2011. Retrieved October 27, 2009.
  26. ^ "Pro-Kremlin Disinformation Outlets Referenced By Hundreds Of Wikipedia Articles". StopFake. EU vs Disinfo. 19 April 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  27. ^ Alfie, Alejandro (30 November 2019). "Militantes K ingresaron a Wikipedia y reescribieron artículos sobre Cristina Kirchner para favorecerla". Clarín (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 September 2024.
  28. ^ a b Fernández Blanco, Pablo (20 May 2020). "Wikipedia. La tendencia prokirchnerista que esconde la enciclopedia virtual". La Nación (in Spanish). Retrieved 5 March 2022.
  29. ^ Fontevecchia, Agustino (8 August 2020). "Cristina vs. Google and the invisible battle for Wikipedia". Buenos Aires Times. Retrieved 5 March 2022.
  30. ^ Cabot, Diego (12 March 2021). "¿Kirchnerpedia? La militancia copó las definiciones políticas de Wikipedia". La Nación (in Spanish). Retrieved 5 March 2022.
  31. ^ Romero, Luis Alberto (25 March 2021). "Wikipedia: el toque del Rey Midas". Clarín (in Spanish). Retrieved 21 September 2024.
  32. ^ "Partido totalitario". El Nacional (in Spanish). 2 June 2022. Retrieved 20 October 2024.
  33. ^ Peiró, Claudia (14 July 2022). "Insólita definición de la Wikipedia sobre el régimen de Cuba: "Estado unipartidista convencional" y "democracia sin partidos"". Infobae (in Spanish). Retrieved 12 September 2024.
  34. ^ "Denuncian el sesgo político encubierto de Wikipedia en español". ABC (in Spanish). 16 September 2022.
  35. ^ Vilches, Jorge (16 September 2022). "Por qué queremos que Wikipedia sea neutral". La Razón (in Spanish). Retrieved 23 September 2024.
  36. ^ Mario de las Heras (14 September 2022). "Intelectuales, artistas, políticos y periodistas firman un manifiesto por la neutralidad en Wikipedia ante su sesgo izquierdista". El Debate (in Spanish). Retrieved 23 September 2024.
  37. ^ Campos, Sofía (15 September 2022). "Un manifiesto denuncia la "ausencia de neutralidad" y el "evidente sesgo" de Wikipedia". La Razón (in Spanish). Retrieved 23 September 2024.

Notes

[edit]
[edit]
Spanish edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Spanish_Wikipedia&oldid=1263726800"