Monografico_3_EN_Doxa_31_Spanish-Castilian_on_Wikipedia

other language versions has been without match. Indeed, the Spanish version was launched only months later, 20th May of the same year. The entry entitled “Spanish language”, which gave rise to the corresponding article, was generated –in the Spanish edition– on 15th January 2002, that is, one year after the general inauguration of the encyclopedia. This fact reveals the importance of the interest that has been aroused, since the article’s creation, in everything related to the language (and its variants) and which unites the Spanish speaking community.

Since its creation, the article “Spanish language” has generated much debate (talk, in Wikipedia terms) concerning all manner of topics related to the language and its variants, including, its alternative names: español ‘Spanish’ versus castellano ‘Castilian’. Discussion concerning what the language should be called was so intense that it spurred the production of a second article entitled: “Controversy about the name of the Spanish language”, which shows how much the encyclopedia’s construction is indeed a collaborative project for all Spanish speaking communities. Although the encyclopedia is not endorsed by any language academy or other academic institution (this would be forbidden by its own policies) and is constructed through the disinterested collaboration of Wikipedians from all regions of the globe, Wikipedia’s Spanish version has acquired such relevance that the Cervantes Institute’s annual report on the state of Spanish in the world contains a section dedicated to it (Instituto Cervantes, 2019: 64).

These issues aside, we are interested in deepening our understanding of how Wikipedia functions in reality and, particularly, in a pragmalinguistic analysis of the controversies that fuel the construction of knowledge in the Spanish version of this online encyclopedia. These controversies arise directly from the nature of subject at the center of debate and quantitative analysis shows that, for versions of the encyclopedia in certain languages such as Spanish (which encompasses diatopic varieties in Spain and the Americas), articles provoke high levels of dispute because of decentralized character of the encyclopedia. According to data released by the Cervantes Institute (2019:5), “almost 483 million people have Spanish as their mother tongue. In turn, the group of potential users of Spanish in the world (a figure which includes speakers with Native Competence, Limited Competence and Foreign Language Learners) exceeds 580 million”. This is, then, the second most important community of native speakers on Wikipedia and, what is more, the Spanish version of Wikipedia is one of the most international in terms of content creation and the decentralization of this version has increased over the last decade. In 2013, it was found that 83.4% of the German version of Wikipedia was produced in Germany; in the French version of Wikipedia, 80.1% of content came from France; in the Italian version, 95% originated in Italy. With respect to the Spanish version, only 32.2% of content was generated in Spain, 14.1% in Argentina and 12.6% in Mexico; in other words, the three countries that contributed the most to Spanish Wikipedia are responsible for only 58.8% of its content (Wikistats, 2013).1 Thus, it can be seen that this is a version without a single pole –or country– of origin. This fact may underlie the inequality seen in the application of editorial criteria with respect to content in different diatopic varieties, no doubt an instigating element in the emergence of numerous strands of debate.

The concept of decentralization to which we have referred can be appreciated through analysis of the two entries studied in this work: “Spanish language” and “Controversy over the name of the Spanish language”. The debate generated amongst

1 To clarify, these data are dated in 2013 and the only edits considered are by non-registered users, i.e., IP editors. Although we are aware of the vagueness of this information, it does, in fact, help us to confirm that the Spanish language version is very clearly decentralised with respect to other versions.