[Wikipedia-l] Re:Junking Spanish Wikipedia?

[Daniel Mayer]

Axel wrote:
> I think we should junk our Spanish Wikipedia, provide a link to their
> site on our main page (they probably don't like to be called
> Wikipedia, so we could simply say "non-English sister projects") and
> have our interwiki links point to them rather then to the Spanish
> Wikipedia.
>
> And if we ask nicely, we may even get a link back to wikipedia.com.
>
> Axel

We can try to cooperate, but I got the distinct feeling from reading their 
about page at : 
http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=Enciclopedia+Libre+Universal+en+Espa%F1ol
that they /really/ don't like us.  

This especially seems true for the English Wikipedia where there is/are (and 
I roughly quote); article censorship and fear of censorship, where 
administrators harass contributors and delete pages (stated in a way that 
suggests this is a form of excessive censorship), and where those same 
administrators block pages from being edited (again suggesting that this is 
some kind of unfair censorship). 

They also seem to not like the fact that a "American for-profit .com company 
that wants to establish a presence in the educational market* controls 
Wikipedia (the .com part may be a directed toward wikipedia's URL and not 
Bomis - my Spanish is rusty and the fish ain't much help). 

All I can say is that they sure have a twisted sense of how things really 
are. 

giskart wrote:
> A great thing of Wikipedia is the global aspect. Please do not blow it.
>
> giskart, Dutch Wikipedia

I agree. It is certainly possible to have amicable forks where an entire 
language wiki moves to a different server and its software is maintained by 
different developers.  However, I think that in the long term the two 
wikiware code-bases will eventually become incompatible and cross-linking and 
any other future inter-lingua stuff will soon stop working. Hopefully this 
type of interfunctionality will convince more and more Spanish speakers to 
contribute to es.wikipedia.com than to enciclopedia.us.es.   

Jimbo wrote:
> I'm very much opposed to closing any of our language wikipedias.  
>
> --Jimbo

I now agree completely. I vote for keeping es.wikipedia.com, load the new 
software and then run the two projects side-by-side for at least a few 
months. If activity doesn't  improve much /then/ and only then should we even 
consider closing the Spanish Wikipedia. 

We above all else must respect those that still contribute to our Spanish 
wiki. Besides as someone already said, we can port the EL stuff to our wiki 
since they use the same license (<hint> I will help with this myself as soon 
as Lee's excellent new software gets installed </hint> --- but please don't 
ask me to help with the translations; its been so long since I've used it 
that my written Spanish is down-right embarrassing).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)