(English: Universal Free Encyclopedia in Spanish) is a

Spanish-language Spanish ( or , Castilian) is a Romance language of the Indo-European language family that evolved from colloquial Latin spoken on the Iberian peninsula. Today, it is a global language with more than 500 million native speakers, mainly in the Am ...

wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...

-based

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, or a digital encyclopedia, is an encyclopedia accessible through the internet. Examples include Wikipedia and ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Digitization of old content In January 19 ...

, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. It uses the

MediaWiki MediaWiki is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source wiki software. It is used on Wikipedia and almost all other Wikimedia movement, Wikimedia Website, websites, including Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata; these sit ...

software. It started as a

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca ' pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods ...

of the

Spanish Wikipedia The Spanish Wikipedia ( es, Wikipedia en español) is a Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on March 8, 2006 and 1,000,000 articles on May 16, 201 ...

History

The was founded by contributors to the

who decided to start an independent project. Led by Edgar Enyedy, they left Wikipedia on 26 February 2002, and created the new website, provided by the

University of Seville The University of Seville (''Universidad de Sevilla'') is a university in Seville, Spain. Founded under the name of ''Colegio Santa María de Jesús'' in 1505, it has a present student body of over 69.200, and is one of the top-ranked universi ...

for free, with the freely licensed articles of the Spanish Wikipedia. The reasons for the split are explained on Enciclopedia Libre. Key issues included concerns about censorship and the possibility of advertising on Wikipedia. Edgar Enyedy stated the main reasons for splitting at that time as: * Perceived expectation that Wikipedia would soon start hosting advertisements. * Non-English Wikipedias were running older versions of

. * When national groups offered help in software development and maintenance, access to theservers was denied. * The downloadable database dumps of Wikipedia content were highly outdated. * Wikipedia was hosted on a

.com The domain name .com is a top-level domain (TLD) in the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet. Added at the beginning of 1985, its name is derived from the word ''commercial'', indicating its original intended purpose for domains registere ...

rather than a

.org The domain name .org is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) of the Domain Name System (DNS) used on the Internet. The name is truncated from ''organization''. It was one of the original domains established in 1985, and has been operated by th ...

domain.

Post-split history

In 2011, Enyedy said that the sole reason for the failure of as a long-term project was that it "was not intended to last. It was merely a form of pressure. Some of the goals were achieved, not all of them, but it was worth the cost." He further said "Nowadays, the romantic point of view is that EL survived and is still going strong." He argued that while the viewpoint is positive, it is not factual.

Statistics

While initially grew much more rapidly than the Spanish Wikipedia, the Spanish Wikipedia overtook it in 2004. Since then, the Spanish Wikipedia has grown at a much greater rate. As of December 2016, the Spanish Wikipedia hosts approximately twenty-six times as many articles as Enciclopedia Libre. Enciclopedia Libre and Spanish Wikipedia article count

Enciclopedia Libre and Spanish Wikipedia article count

References

External links

*
Old website

EL Taller
— fork of Enciclopedia Libre * Alvarez, Carlo
"Enciclopedias en Internet"
''

El País ''El País'' (; ) is a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Spain. ''El País'' is based in the capital city of Madrid and it is owned by the Spanish media conglomerate PRISA. It is the second most circulated daily newspaper in Spain . ''El ...

''. 29 December 2005. {{DEFAULTSORT:Enciclopedia Libre Universal En Espanol History of Wikipedia MediaWiki websites Spanish online encyclopedias Wiki communities Internet properties established in 2002 Spanish-language websites 2002 establishments in Spain University of Seville 21st-century encyclopedias Wikipedia controversies

History

Post-split history

Statistics

See also

References

External links