Available in Spanish Created by Edgar Enyedy Alexa rank 15,172 | Owner University of Seville Website enciclopedia.us.es | |
 | ||
Type of site Wiki Internet encyclopedia | ||
Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language wiki encyclopedia, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0. It uses the MediaWiki software. It started as a fork of the Spanish Wikipedia.
Contents
History
The Enciclopedia Libre was founded by contributors to the Spanish-language Wikipedia 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 for free, with the freely licensed articles of the Spanish-language Wikipedia.
The reasons for the split are explained on Enciclopedia Libre. Key issues included concerns about censorship and the possibility of advertising on Wikipedia. From the interview with Edgar Enyedy, the main reasons for splitting at that time were:
Post-split history
In 2011, Enyedy said that the sole reason for the failure of Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español as a long term project was because 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."
In 2011, Enyedy 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 Enciclopedia Libre 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 January 2015, the Spanish Wikipedia hosts approximately twenty-three times as many articles as Enciclopedia Libre.