In February 2002, Larry Sanger wrote an e-mail to a mailing list stating that Bomis was considering selling advertisements on Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales and Sanger responded by saying that they did not immediately plan to implement advertisements,[1] but Enyedy began establishing a fork.

[2] After the spin-off, the Spanish Wikipedia had very little activity until the upgrade to the Phase III of the software, later renamed MediaWiki, when the number of new users started to increase again.

During Wikimania 2009, free-software activist Richard Stallman criticized the Spanish Wikipedia for restricting links to the Rebelion.org left-wing web site and allegedly banning users who had complained about what had happened.

In April 2022, the European Union's East StratCom Task Force found that four pro-Russian disinformation news outlets (SouthFront, NewsFront, InfoRos and Strategic Culture Foundation) were referenced in 52 articles of the Spanish Wikipedia.

[30] In March 2021, Argentine historian Luis Alberto Romero [es] criticized the Wikimedia Argentina chapter in Clarín.

He blamed those on the top of the Spanish Wikipedia hierarchy, who can "accept or reject the collaborations" and who "since 2009 are crowded by a group of Kirschnerist militants".

In June 2022, Venezuelan newspaper El Nacional observed that the Spanish Wikipedia describes the United Socialist Party of Venezuela as "a political party with socialist, anticapitalist, antiimperialist and internationalist ideology, which takes as its principles Simon Bolivar's work, scientific socialism, Christianism and liberation theology."

El Nacional then observed that the Spanish Wikipedia article omits that the party's goal has been to turn into the only existing political organization in Venezuela.

[34] In July 2022, an article in Infobae criticized the Spanish Wikipedia for using euphemisms to describe Cuba's political system to avoid a clear characterization as a dictatorship.

[35] The author ridicules the Spanish Wikipedia for claiming that Cuba is "similar to other states with parliamentary forms of government" and that its National Assembly "consists of representatives that are elected by universal, free, direct and secret vote" by Cubans every five years.

In September 2022, a manifesto signed by Juan Carlos Girauta, Álvaro Vargas Llosa, Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo, Joaquín Leguina, Albert Rivera, Daniel Lacalle, Lucía Etxebarría, Félix de Azúa, Francisco Sosa Wagner, Cristina Ayala, Miriam Tey and Toni Cantó among others was published denouncing political bias on the Spanish Wikipedia.