The Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español is a Spanish language WikiWiki encyclopedia, released under the GFDL. It uses the MediaWiki software.

Contents

1 History 2 Possiblity of a merger 3 Statistics 4 External links and references

History

The Enciclopedia was founded by contributors to the Spanish-language Wikipedia who decided to start an independent project. They left the Wikipedian community, led by Edgar Enyedy, on February 26, 2002, bringing with them all the articles of the Spanish-language Wikipedia at that time to a new website, provided by the University of Seville for free.

Possiblity of a merger

In October 2002, an effort led by Wikipedia participant Daniel Mayer (who goes by the username Maveric149) and others was made to reunite the projects, but the participants of Enciclopedia Libre voted against reunification before Wikipedia could offer a reunification proposal. The users of Enciclopedia Libre did, however, leave open the possibility for a future merge and expressed an interest in maintaining lines of communication. This episode also sparked a great deal of discussion about the role of the non-English speaking Wikipedias and has led to several changes and planned changes wanted by the non-English speaking Wikipedia communities.

Several talks have been made to make a merger. There also have been changes on Wikipedia and Enciclopedia Libre that may contribute to a merger:

• Creation of a non-profit Wikipedia organisation;
• Multilingual portal
• Installation of PhaseIII software on Enciclopedia Libre

For more information and to participate in the talks, see Wikipedia:Embassy.

See also: Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination.

In October and November 2003, the Spanish Wikipedia used a bot to import articles from a dump of Enciclopedia Libre.

Statistics

   Date      # entries (conservative article count)
11 Mar 2002,  3036
20 Mar 2002,  4116
 2 Apr 2002,  5972
 1 May 2002,  7540
27 May 2002,  7837
13 Jun 2002,  8125
13 Jul 2002,  8519
 4 Aug 2002,  8658
31 Aug 2002,  8996
13 Sep 2002,  9237
 3 Oct 2002,  9362 
26 Oct 2002, 10258
17 Jun 2003, 14250 
 8 Jul 2003, 14428
 2 Aug 2003, 14662
 6 Sep 2003, 15116
 2 Nov 2003, 15572
 6 Dec 2003, 16039
20 Mar 2004, 19688
 6 Nov 2004, 25038

External links and references

• Enciclopedia Libre Universal en Español
• User page of Edgar Enyedy at Enciclopedia Libre
• There are other, non-Wikimedia, free Wiki-based encyclopedia projects independent of Wikipedia:
  • Викизнание - Russian (Русский)
  • Susning.nu - Swedish (Svenska)
  • Wikinfo - Wikinfo is like the English Wikipedia but with focus on POV content