[Wikipedia-l] Spanish Wikipedia

Mon Sep 30 05:25:00 UTC 2002

I see that a couple of people are busy porting Encyclopedia Libre 
( http://enciclopedia.us.es/ ) articles to the Spanish Wikipedia. This raises 
a /very/ important question;

Which project are we going have our interlanguage links point to?
AstroNomer has already finished translating language-ES.php and wants the 
developers to install the new Phase III software for the Spanish Wikipedia on 
the Wikipedia server. 

This of course would be a slap in the face of the Encyclopedia Libre folks - 
many of whom want more cooperation with Wikipedia. But there is a very vocal 
few who hate Wikipedia. 

What is everybody's preference here? Should we majorly help revive the 
Spanish Wikipedia by upgrading their software or should we put our support 
behind Encyclopedia Libre. Remember, EL broke away from the Spanish Wikipedia 
over a misunderstanding (and they still have slanderous and unfair statements 
about Wikipedia on their about page see: 
http://enciclopedia.us.es/wiki.phtml?title=Enciclopedia+Libre+Universal+en+Espa%F1ol 
)?

Encyclopedia Libre currently has more articles and more users/contributors 
but they don't seem to have a software development team (just a person or 
two). Also many thousands of their "articles" are just templates so their 
absence from the Spanish Wikipedia isn't that big of a deal. Also, simplified 
logistics is a reason why it makes more sense to keep everything on server(s) 
that our developers can access.

However, my gut feeling tells me that we should at least try to work with EL 
and then if that doesn't work our fallback plan would be to upgrade the 
Spanish Wikipedia and put all of our support behind them. However, if we do 
go this route and EL upgrades and we point our interlanguage links there, 
then what about all the work that is going on right now at the Spanish 
Wikipedia?

I just want to have this decided so that I can start contributing (I'm such a 
WIkipediaholic that I could majorly help revive the Spanish Wikipedia by 
porting EL material but I don't want to have duplicated effort between two 
very similar projects if it can be avoided).

I think this is very important because the project that gets our new 
software, inter-language links, support and future inter-language 
functionality is probably the project that will endure. I know it will be the 
project I contribute to. 

Any other thoughts on this? 

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)