[Wikipedia-l] This Español/Castellano split

[Daniel Mayer]

I just noticed that in addition to the
Spanish/Castilian wikipedia at
http://es.wikipedia.com/wiki.cgi?Portada (using the
old, ugly and difficult to use UseMod wikiware) with
1400 articles there is a very lively FDL’d Spanish
wiki encyclopedia at http://enciclopedia.us.es/ (using
php wikiware) with nearly 9,000 articles. 

Did the Spanish wikipedia fork into two projects? And
if so why? Seems like a lot of wasted effort to have
two projects in the same language and also wasted
interwiki link functionality since the more popular
Spanish wiki is not on the same server (could we make
interwiki links anyway?). This Español/Castellano
split makes about as much sense as having separate
American English and British English wikipedias would.


BTW, why are we reporting the stats of the
http://enciclopedia.us.es for the Spanish wikipedia?
Also, when in the world are the non-English wikipedias
going to get a software upgrade? I would love to start
adding inter wiki lingua links in many of the
non-English articles to point back to the English
versions (esp. the German chemistry articles – which
are quite good, oftentimes better than their English
counterparts).  

Hum, I just read their about page (warning, my Spanish
is rusty). From what I read, they seem to be rather
critical of Wikipedia, citing as fact that Wikipedia
is a “for-profit project of a North American company”
and something about the fact that Wikipedia is at a
“dotcom” address. Then they go on to state, again as
fact, that the English wikipedia has an “elite with
administrator privileges” who “harasses contributors”
and “censure content” and “prohibit editing of certain
pages”. Yikes! Do we deserve this?     

--maveric149 


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