Monografico_3_EN_Doxa_31_Spanish-Castilian_on_Wikipedia

In this study, we propose three working hypotheses:

H.1. That the articles “Spanish language” and “Controversy over the name of the Spanish language” on Wikipedia translate the complexity and plurality of this language, as well as the debates surrounding it, into the digital environment.

H.2. That “discussions” concerning both articles manifest as wide-ranging and pluralistic debating forums.

H.3. That the construction of Spanish Wikipedia is achieved through consensus and without the existence of a monopolistic authority.

4. Discussion

4.1. Results and data analysis of the articles and associated discussions

Monitoring revealed that the two articles studied receive a significant volume of traffic and construction activity (Table 2). Although, as might be expected, it is the article “Spanish language” that achieves highest levels of participation and impact within the online community. In order to understand the impact of “Spanish language” it is interesting to note that this article is cited, or is made reference to in 47,951 different articles on Spanish Wikipedia, something that reflects the level of importance given to this article within this version of the encyclopedia.

The first significant piece of information is the size of the articles: that concerning the naming controversy contains 3,060 words (20,586 characters) while that concerning the language contains 10,322 (67,949 characters). The “Spanish language” article therefore is three times the size of the other article. It is also interesting to analyze article size in terms of bytes: the language article comprises 245,476 while that on the controversy has only 36,694. As can be observed, the article on the language is largest by a factor of seven; this is due to the fact that it uses more visual resources and images than the other article. The “Spanish language” article makes use of numerous maps to demonstrate how the language has expanded across the world and uses photographs and images of national flags to indicate those countries where the language is spoken. Naturally, all these resources imply a considerable increase in byte count.

However, the area where the article “Spanish language” stands out most is, without doubt, in terms of quality indices since it contains a high number of references within its text (520 in total), of which 76% are unambiguous (395); it also distinguishes itself by its huge number of watchers (546). It is, as a result, an article that is controlled and studied by an authentic community of users. More than half a million users take an interest and receive automatic alerts whenever the article undergoes a modification or change. In this way, the likelihood of substandard edits going uncorrected is very unlikely in the construction of this particular page. The article “Controversy over the name of the Spanish language” also rates highly in terms of its number of watchers (90) but, it is inferior in terms of the number of references cited: a mere 34 compared to the 520 of “Spanish language”.

As indicated by Rodríguez-Mateos and Hernández-Pérez (2018), it is true that the number of references is important, but so is the quality of said references. Essentially, citing peer reviewed scientific literature would appear to be more rigorous than referring to literature in the general press or from non-scientific blogs. In the case of “Spanish language”, the origins