(English: Universal Free Encyclopedia in Spanish) was a

Spanish-language Spanish () or Castilian () is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family that evolved from the Vulgar Latin spoken on the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a world language, gl ...

wiki A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

-based

online encyclopedia An online encyclopedia, also called an Internet encyclopedia, is a digital encyclopedia accessible through the Internet. Some examples include pre-World Wide Web services that offered the '' Academic American Encyclopedia'' beginning in 1980, Enc ...

that started as a fork of the

Spanish Wikipedia The Spanish Wikipedia () is the Spanish-language edition of Wikipedia, a free online encyclopedia. It has articles. Started in May 2001, it reached 100,000 articles on 8 March 2006, and 1,000,000 articles on 16 May 2013. It is the -largest Wikip ...

, released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 and using the same

MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,mailarchive:wikipedia-l/2001-August/000382.html, Magnus Manske's announc ...

software.

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, Andalusia, Spain. Founded under the name of ''Colegio Santa María de Jesús'' in 1505, in 2022 it has a student body of 57,214,U-Ranking Universidades español ...

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 rather than a .org 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. By late 2024 the site had ceased operations.

References

External links

*
Old website

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

El País (; ) is a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Spain. 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 . is the most read newspaper in ...

''. 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

See also

References

External links