Juan Antonio Ruiz Rivas wrote:

Hello everybody, greetings from "Enciclopedia Libre".

First of all I want to clarify that general sense from people in EL is about friendship and goodwill towards Wikipedia project, though some of us disagree about some questions concerned to Wikipedia we are talking about in the past.

We were talking and voting about the reunification as we made at http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=Enciclopedia:Retorno_a_Wikipedia

and finally we have decided to stay in the same server here at Sevilla and under the name of "Enciclopedia Libre", nevertheless we do not discard the possibility on returning Wikipedia in the future

I'm only speaking for myself and how I see things;

It's great that your project is keeping open the possibility of reunification but with each passing day the two separate projects grow apart as articles become distinct from each other. This will make reunification in the future increasingly more difficult. Since the Spanish Wikipedia software is so badly broken right now there are very few contributors and there really isn't that much difference between the Spanish Wikipedia today compared with the database you took to Seville many months ago. But now the Spanish Wikipedia is going to get Phase III software and I foresee much more activity there as first bi- and multi-lingual people from the other Wikipedia languages start contributing and then as more native speakers join es.wiki.

We would be much stronger together rather than apart. I am saddened that your community decided to vote on this before we were even done discussing the matter. I feel we were moving in a very positive direction, reaching consensus, and trying to change Wikipedia so that it will be agreeable to you (and more agreeable to the current non-English Wikipedias) but the pre-emptive vote has halted our reunification efforts before we even had a chance to formally ask you to rejoin (or even start any negotiations for that matter).

(whenever people in Wikipedia agree)

We were reaching consensus on this before the vote ended the process. The emerging consensus I feel was, "Yes we want you back" and "Yes we are willing to change in order to make this possible". I for one have been doing some serious soul-searching to see why there was a fork in the first place and exploring ways that we could address those issues in a reasonable way. But your project has made its decision and I have to respect and accept that. I also wish your project well and hope the Spanish Wikipedia and EL can be friends and exchange content without hard feelings (we need to discuss how to best do this).

and our wish is about collaboration, talking and good relationships.

I also hope that we can collaborate and have a good working relationship but competition for Spanish-speaking users may overshadow this if we are not careful. Very soon there will be two different very active wiki communities both trying to write a free content, neutral focus, encyclopedia in Spanish. Right now there really is only one active community, yours.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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