288 | nº 31, pp. 283-302 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
Spanish/Castilian on Wikipedia: voices and discussion forum
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
— User pages: where those who have registered accounts can write about their interests and present themselves to the rest of the community.
— User talk pages: where direct, public messages can be left for other users. These work in a similar way to the article discussion pages and anyone can join in on these spaces.
— Café: a zone for the exchange of ideas, proposals, and consultation about the Wikipedia project. Users can ask about technical issues, ask for help from more seasoned users, propose topics for community discussion, amongst other things.
Also found as part of the Café interface and accessible from its homepage we find the:
— Requests for administrator attention: This space is a superior forum for problem resolution. Here, help can be sought from administrators to settle all manner of conflicts. Mostly, this concerns edit wars, warnings about bad behavior on the part of certain users, or the repeated sabotaging of articles, requests for deleted articles to be reinstated and much more. When a dispute is sufficiently intractable that it cannot be handled within the virtual environment, it may be escalated as a petition to Meta Wikimedia as is occurring currently with regards to the Croatian language version of Wikipedia, where a majority of editors have formed a nucleus with far right tendencies that bars from the project any editor attempting to present an alternative view point with regards to the presentation of information (Lorente, 2020: 81).
Although there are many studies and investigations on Wikipedia in other languages, especially English, in Spanish there is often a certain lack of precision concerning basic terms and concepts. Nevertheless, we consider it of interest to make reference to these in order to demonstrate that, even in the absence of centralization, the encyclopedia is becoming ever more hierarchical in its ways of working and it employs the necessary mechanisms (using filters) to enable the production of content, governed, as ever, by the ideal of achieving rigor and reliability. To this end, and by way of summary, we include a glossary of the fundamental terms and subjects connected with the Spanish version of this online encyclopedia (Table 1).
Table 1. Current vocabulary used by Spanish Wikipedia editors with definitions
Term
Definition
Usuario anónimo o usuario IP
(Unregistered: IP or not logged in)
A person who edits Wikipedia pages without having an account and a username. Generally, these users are termed IP editors.
Usuario o editor
(Registered user)
A person who has an account and username (nickname) who edits pages on the platform.
Usuario autoconfirmado
(Autoconfirmed user)
An editor who has made more than 50 edits and has an account that is at least 4 days old. They can edit certain protected articles.
Verificador
(Reviewer)
An editor who has asked the community for permission to validate new articles.
Bibliotecario
(Administrator)
An editor who is trusted by the community to protect, delete, restore articles; block certain users who behave inappropriately; and to complete tasks that other users are not permitted to.