Spanish Wikipedia, 5th in number of articles

The Spanish Wikipedia (WP-ES) has for the first time since March 2002 outnumbered the Polish Wikipedia in the official article count. Both wikipedia versions crossed today at 838,800 articles. WP-ES stands now 5th in the official number of articles, right behind English, German, French, and Italian versions.
WP-ES is the Spanish version of the open encyclopedia (anyone can edit its contents, and management is run by volunteers). Both the English and the Spanish versions are the most complete and consulted encyclopedias in their respective languages, and overall wikipedia.org is the only top-10 site of the Internet that has no profit or advertising (source: Alexa).

Evolution of the number of articles in the largest Wikipedia versions (2001-2011). Source: Stats.Wikimedia

The official number of articles is not the sole criterion for assessing the quality of Wikipedias (http://stats.wikimedia.org). In number of internal links (references to other articles of the same encyclopedia), WP-ES is also in the 5th position, and 4th in number of daily editions. It remains the 3rd most read, after the English and Japanese.

From March 20, 2008, when WP-ES surpassed its Swedish counterpart, the Spanish version has also surpassed the Portuguese and Dutch versions, and at current rates will also exceed the Italian in a few months. The slow but steady rise of the Spanish version is to normalize the poor number of articles relative to the size of the spanish-speaking community, an anomaly that WP-ES is dragging since in February 2002 a part of their community forked from the Wikipedia project due to disagreements on the  eventuality of incorporating advertising (see article in WIRED). That fork gave birth to the Enciclopedia Libre, which is still active. At the time of forking, WP-ES was second in number of entries.

If reached, the fourth position will probably be representative of the role of Spanish as a communication language in the Internet. In the midterm it seems unlikely overtaking the French version, which counts already 1,165,000 articles. But beyond being a good symptom of the health of the Spanish language, the quality of WP-ES can be valued as an essential tool for education and future development.