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Can I expect that the Spanish used on the Spanish-language Wikipedia, such as this article is standard Spanish, or are they just articles originally written in English that have been translated into Spanish via Google Translate or Bing translate, etc.?

IOW, are they a good learning tool for somebody learning Spanish, or will they lead me down the garden path?

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    @Poncho Could you be more specific? I don't know what you do, but there are disciplines of knowledge in which Wikipedia is as good as books.
    – c.p.
    Apr 30, 2014 at 17:58
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    When I need some info from wiki, I have to do my research in english(I am mexican, spanish native), since the info of spanish wiki is a bad translation of the english one, and it only have the main idea of it, it lacks so much info.
    – Poncho
    Apr 30, 2014 at 19:13
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    @c.p. en el mundo académico no es considerada una fuente de información válida May 1, 2014 at 0:25
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    Anyone can edit wikipedia. So it's NOT a reliable source of information, and neither is a good example of writing. There are popular subjects with a lot of reviewers, where you may be confident, but others you have to rely on the skills of unprofessional or untrained people. In the past I used my "wikipedia editing skills" to win a lot of "bar bettings" ;)
    – roetnig
    Dec 28, 2016 at 16:20
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    @c.p. Poncho is saying that the Wikipedia articles will have grammatically valid sentences, but the information in the articles may be incorrect.
    – Golden Cuy
    Oct 8, 2018 at 10:19

4 Answers 4

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I think Spanish Wikipedia is well written. I have not found cases in which the article has translation problems or so. That Android article is cool.

In my opinion they are not translated automatically (almost) never, at least I don't do so.

Wikipedia will take you the right way.

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You can acces on the tab View history up in the corner Ver historial to see changes that has been done since the first time.

http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Android&action=history

And on the tab discusión you can see users discussing about changes to apply to that article.

On the history you can compare two versions and looking the version between 22:50 10 mar 2014 and 09:17 11 mar 2014

You can see how someone used a very rare translator...

Honeycomb translated as Perropollo acho

Gingerbread translated as Gingerperro

http://es.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Android&diff=73107869&oldid=73099948

But it is something normal, everyone can edit an article, native speakers try to edit when they see that kind of errors.

Most of the times is not a translation.

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  • That's vandalism, not translations ;)
    – JoulSauron
    May 1, 2014 at 15:54
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From what I know the articles are written by native speakers, they aren't the translation of other articles, if you check the articles are different across the different languages.

I use Wikipedia to see how to translate a specific terms, in my case in computer related topics.

You can see in the references, many of them are in Spanish

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Automatic translations are frowned upon in Spanish Wikipedia as you may imagine. However, I find them to be more or less common, especially in articles with few editions.

They're easy to spot if they have obvious grammar errors, of course. But sometimes the choice of words and expressions may reveal that an article is (or was originally) an automatic translation. For example, if an article says that is some place "el español es hablado" (a direct translation of "Spanish is spoken") where "se habla español" feels much more natural for Spanish speakers, chances are that it was in fact automatically translated.

A rule of thumb would be to choose articles on general topics or topics well-known by Spanish speakers, because they will likely have been edited and supervised by many different authors. You can also try to go for articles that are highly rated by the community in terms of quality (artículos buenos / artículos destacados).

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