Wikipedians by these articles allows us to illustrate how this online encyclopedia enables the collaborative construction of knowledge. In addition, we will analyze the most common (im)politeness strategies used in the discussions surrounding these two articles. It is widely known that every article has a section, or space, for “talk” where users/editors lay out their points for debate and in that way come to the compromises necessary to develop each entry. Although it is made clear explicitly that these “talk” spaces are not intended to be forums for polemic, user behavior here is similar, in many aspects, to that seen on the discussion forums common on social networks

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. Characterization of the Spanish version of Wikipedia

While Wikipedia is defined as one encyclopedia, it is, in reality, the sum of 309 different language versions –although a handful of these are in the process of “incubation” due to their low activity levels–. Each one of these editions is distinct and, although they are all produced with the same objective in terms of reliability (Anexo: Wikipedias, 2020) and are governed by the same rules, the “five pillars of Wikipedia” (Los cinco pilares, 2020), they follow different working practices and habits in their creation. In this way, it is interesting to note that Wikipedia is not edited in the same way as a traditional encyclopedia written in one language and later translated into others, rather, the 309 versions are distinct (although they may include translations or many similar articles). National versions of Wikipedia do not exist, rather, linguistic versions (and, in some cases, dialect versions). For example, Spanish Wikipedia is a common edition for all Spanish speaking countries and all the users of this language and its variants. Whether they live in a Spanish speaking country or not, these users can not only consult it but also edit Spanish Wikipedia –so long as the web site is available bearing in mind that in certain countries, such as China, it is not legal (BBC, 2019)–. Also, some countries have their own online encyclopedias, but these are separate projects unconnected to Wikipedia: as an example, Cuba has EcuRed and in Spain we find the la Enciclopedia Libre Universal (Tkacz, 2011). All the different language versions of Wikipedia come under the umbrella of the wider digital frame of Wikimedia, which fosters additional sister projects: worldwide archives of photography; videos; sound; and other digital media. There is an immense plurality of digital content (Wikimedia Foundation, 2020).

Comparing the different language versions, Wikipedia in Spanish comes ninth in terms of the number of entries included: more than 1,600,000, but second in the world in terms of user numbers, measured as the number of internauts that have engaged in some activity within its digital environment over the last 30 days (List of Wikipedias by speakers per article 2018 and Wikistats 2020). This clear disparity between the number of entries and the number of users seems to indicate that the Spanish speaking community, although active in terms of consultation, is far more reticent when it comes content creation (Claes y Deltell, 2019).

Whatever the case, despite the divergence between different versions of the encyclopedia referred to here, there is, in all cases, a common concern for maintaining order and the collaborative creation of a product under decentralized conditions, where this is understood as the absence of hierarchical structures and centralized organizational mechanisms, or conflict-resolution procedures based on authority. Nevertheless, in the absence of such structures, mechanisms, and