TheSpanish Wikipedia (Spanish:Wikipedia en español) is theSpanish-language edition ofWikipedia, a free onlineencyclopedia. It has 2,031,761 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 32nd in terms ofarticle depth among Wikipedias.
Academic studies have indicated that the Spanish Wikipedia is less reliable than theEnglish andGerman Wikipedias, as well as more prone to disinformation from Russian government outlets. It has also been criticized for whitewashingleft-wing authoritarian regimes such as Cuba's and for allowing damaging disinformation about living people who are critical of the left. The Spanish edition is one of the worst Wikipedias in retention of new editors. It has one of the highest edit revert rates and the second lowest number of administrators per active editors (0.38%), behind theJapanese Wikipedia.
In February 2002,Larry Sanger wrote an e-mail to a mailing list stating thatBomis 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 afork.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 renamedMediaWiki, when the number of new users started to increase again.[clarification needed][citation needed]
Ever since then, the Spanish Wikipedia has been far more active than Enciclopedia Libre was.[3][4] By late 2024, Enciclopedia Libre had ceased operations.
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 theEnciclopedia 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: firstbot created on this Wikipedia. Its user name is SpeedyGonzalez.
18 July 2004: the Spanish edition switches toUTF-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 examineIP addresses.
11 December 2006: following a vote, the Arbitration Committee, whose local name isComité de Resolución de Conflictos (CRC) is created.[10]
11 June 2007: last local image was erased, so all media are retrieved fromWikimedia 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.
2 January 2025: the Spanish Wikipedia reaches the count of 2,000,000 articles.
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
The Spanish Wikipedia has the second most registered users, after theEnglish Wikipedia, and the fifth most active users, after the English,French,German andJapanese Wikipedias.[14] It ranks among the worse Wikipedias in retention of new editors and has one of the highest edit revert rates.[15] The Spanish Wikipedia has the second lowest number of administrators per active editors (0.4%), behind the Japanese edition.[16]
It is ranked eighth for number of articles, below other Wikipedias devoted to languages with smaller numbers of speakers, such asGerman,French,Cebuano,Dutch andRussian. 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.[17] As of October 2012, the Spanish Wikipedia was the fourth Wikipedia in terms of the number of edits.[18] As of December 2024, it is the sixth Wikipedia by the number of page views, behind the English, Japanese,Russian, German and French Wikipedias.[19]
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%).[20] Note that a number of bots are hosted in the Netherlands.
Following a 2007 study byNetsuus (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 inCatalan, 0.64% inGalician and 0.26% inBasque).[21][clarification needed]
The Spanish Wikipedia only accepts free images, and has rejectedfair 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 useWikimedia Commons for images and other media in the future.[22]
Unlike the French and English Wikipedias, the Spanish Wikipedia does not have anArbitration 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,[23] have been deprecated, being the only Wikipedia where it is forbidden to use these templates, instead relying on categories that perform the same function.
Followinga vote in August 2004, administrators on the Spanish Wikipedia took the name ofbibliotecarios (librarians). Other discarded options wereusuarios especiales (special users) orbasureros (janitors).
The majority of edits done by unregistered users are reverted by bots targeting edits that are considered vandalism. Due to this, there wereproposals andcommunity votes to let the Spanish Wikipedia disable edits from unregistered users similarly to thePortuguese Wikipedia, but these have not been officially implemented.
In 2023, after acommunity vote that lasted from August 1 to August 15, the Spanish Wikipedia enabled a bot policy usingORES that reverts edits to rate good faith edits using the y-parameters provided by the platform available underMIT License.
A comparative study by theColegio Libre de Eméritos, made by Manuel Arias Maldonado (University of Málaga) and published in 2010, compared some articles with those of the English andGerman 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.[24]
In a study published in 2017, seventy-seven university students, most withCatalan 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.[26] 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 morereliable." Specifically, the participants were asked the following question: "If an article is available inCatalan, Spanish andEnglish, 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)."
DuringWikimania 2009, free-software activistRichard Stallman criticized the Spanish Wikipedia for restricting links to theRebelión.org left-wing web site and allegedly banning users who had complained about what had happened. Participants on the Spanish Wikipedia responded that Rebelión.org is primarily anews aggregator, that links to aggregators should be replaced with links to original publishers whenever possible, and that they considered the issue to be one ofspam.[27]
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.
The Spanish Wikipedia has been criticized for offering awhitewashed coverage of left-wing politicianCristina Kirchner while presenting a negative portrayal of her center-right opponentMauricio Macri.[29][30][31][32] The May 2020 article inLa Nación emphasized that, even though Argentine newspaperClarín 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".[30]
In March 2021, Argentine historian Luis Alberto Romero [es] criticized the Wikimedia Argentina chapter inClarín.[33] He described how hundreds of articles on the history of Argentina were manipulated "with the classic taste of theK 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 newspaperEl Nacional observed that the Spanish Wikipedia describes theUnited 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 andliberation 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.[34]
In July 2022, an article inInfobae criticized the Spanish Wikipedia for using euphemisms to describe Cuba's political system to avoid a clear characterization as a dictatorship.[35] The author ridicules the Spanish Wikipedia for claiming that Cuba is "similar to other states with parliamentary forms of government" and that itsNational Assembly "consists of representatives that are elected by universal, free, direct and secret vote" by Cubans every five years.
