[Wikipedia-l] This Español/Castellano split

[Brion VIBBER]

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> 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? 

Remember the brief ruckus a few weeks ago re: a submitted new logo image 
for the French wikipedia? Imagine that kind of discussion going on for 
several weeks with no voice of reason.

 > 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.

Yes, it's pointless and stupid. I would recommend simply dumping the 
nearly unused one on Wikipedia and changing the URL used for the lang 
links for Spanish to point to the forked server, at least if it's okay 
with them.

> BTW, why are we reporting the stats of the
> http://enciclopedia.us.es for the Spanish wikipedia?

Because we intlwiki folks are completists.

> Also, when in the world are the non-English wikipedias
> going to get a software upgrade?

Gee, wouldn't we like to know? We were promised an upgrade in March. 
Then in May. Then in June. Never materialized; at most we got a test 
server...

> 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?     

What, does 24 write in Spanish now? ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)