WikiPilipinas

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

WikiPilipinas
the hip and free Philippine encyclopedia that you can edit
Type of site
Online community
Available inEnglish, Filipino, and other Philippine languages
OwnerVibal Foundation
Created byVibal Foundation
URLwikipilipinas.org
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedAugust 29, 2007; 16 years ago (2007-08-29)
Current statusOnline

WikiPilipinas (formerly known as Wikipiniana) is an

neutral point-of-view
principle.

Conceived in late 2006 by Philippine publishing magnate Gaspar Vibal, WikiPilipinas (as Wikipiniana) officially went live on June 12, 2007, with several thousand Philippine-related articles forked from the English Wikipedia. Its name was officially changed from Wikipiniana to WikiPilipinas a few weeks later on July 7. The service was formally launched at the 28th Manila International Book Fair in late August of the same year.

Overview

While it started as a

academic encyclopedia" as stated in its official policies and guidelines page. Despite this, the online resource does contain articles on encyclopedic topics such as history, culture, sports, and politics. In addition to those mentioned, WikiPilipinas styles itself as a mash-up of several entities; a "Who's Who" of prominent Filipinos, a directory of institutions and companies, an almanac of the Philippines and a community portal for the different ethnic groups in the Philippines. As an online resource using the wiki model, it bills itself as a collaborative effort-content provider. The most major goal that the wiki has stated is "to build the largest Philippine knowledge database". Like Wikipedia, the contents of WikiPilipinas are open to editing by anyone with access to the Internet. However, editors must register before they are allowed to edit.[1]

WikiPilipinas was particularly launched by the Vibal Foundation, a nonprofit organization which previously created Filipiniana.net, and WikiPilipinas.org (a reference guide on the Philippines). Conjunctively, the Vibal Foundation (per Gaspar Vibal and his mother) made a historical move in Philippine education, when it also launched on June 12, 2008, the 110th Philippine Declaration of Independence day, e-turo.org, as conduit of these 3 landmark education tools. Tin Mandigma, editor-in-chief of E-turo.org explained that it is an e-learning portal which "seeks to provide free and quality learning materials online to teachers and students; it gives teachers access to lesson plans and modules based on textbook materials published by Vibal Publishing House, Inc. amid plans to offer Department of Education-approved content from various learning institutions as supplementary teaching materials. One of the most common complaints of teachers is that while the Internet has so much information, most of it cannot be adapted to the local classroom. With this project, we hope to help teachers sort through the clutter and give them quality information that would be useful for their students."[2]

Differences from Wikipedia

Although it is modeled after Wikipedia, WikiPilipinas differs from it in distinct ways. Founder Gaspar Vibal describes "improvements" including a

policy, WikiPilipinas has no rule preventing one from writing about oneself or one's family.[7]

Content

The contents of WikiPilipinas were originally

aggregated from a selection of around 15,000 Philippine-related articles of Wikipedia. The addition of original articles began soon after, created by WikiPilipinas volunteers and its editorial team.[4] All text in WikiPilipinas was originally licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL),[1] but on March 26, 2011, it migrated to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
.

History

WikiPilipinas was originally conceived as Wikipiniana, an

Vibal Publishing House, Inc. (VPHI), and mother of Gaspar Vibal learned about online publishing and knowledge sharing. She introduced the concepts through Gaspar's Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org, the world's biggest Philippine encyclopedia available on the Web.[9]

The actual conceptualization of WikiPilipinas (then-Wikipiniana) occurred in February 2007. In planning,

fork of Wikipedia however, Wikipiniana was to be a "hipper" and "freer" version, including almanac lists and directories.[7] The WikiPilipinas team, headed by Grimaldo as webmaster and Alfred Ursua as its managing editor, drew up an initial masterlist of priority contents for Project Wikipiniana.[10]

The project officially began on March 15, 2007. It was first made available online three months after on June 12 to coincide with the country's official

Manila Times and dozens of Philippine bloggers.[1] In a press release on August 23, the site's publicists claimed to be "the fastest online startup in Philippine history" due to the site receiving 100,000 visitors during the slew of accesses that occurred after the site was covered by the media the previous day.[13]

WikiPilipinas had its official launch during the 28th Manila International Book Fair in late August 2007.[14]

The project itself is owned by the Vibal Foundation, which bills itself as the "corporate social arm" of Vibal Publishing House. It is a sister-project to Filipiniana.net, a Philippine-oriented research portal.[15]

Technical specifications

As a Philippine company, the site's physical

Mbit/s.[15]

Impact and public reaction

WikiPilipinas has been the subject of several articles by major broadsheet newspapers in the Philippines.[4][11][15][16] The service itself has been covered by GMA Network news in segments on two of the station's daily news programs.[17][18]

Many of its observers on the blogging community and Tambayan Philippines, the Philippine Wikipedia regional notice board, have observed that it is "trying to be everything all at once: magazine, putative encyclopedia, pluralistic community forum, soapbox-for-a-day, rumor rag, fight club. It is a pastische of different entities, each of which has been successful on its own, but it remains to be seen whether they will be as successful when smashed together. It is less an organic fusion as it is an unnatural pile-up of knowledge-sharing methodologies taken from Euro-America. In many ways, it is symptomatic and representative of the Philippine condition."[19]

Upon learning of its inception, a few Filipino bloggers questioned the usefulness of WikiPilipinas as a

web searches, making effort spent in updating WikiPilipinas articles better spent working on their equivalent Wikipedia articles.[22] He later reiterated some of these concerns in an interview with the Manila Bulletin in September. In the interview, he criticized WikiPilipinas for prioritizing publicity over streamlining the site's policies and guidelines.[23] Notable Filipino blogger Abraham Olandres personally mentioned Villar's criticism of WikiPilipinas. In his post, Olandres agreed that the Filipino-based service would be useless and redundant unless it "came up with its own set of content".[24] In a later entry, Olandres pointed out that WikiPilipinas' lack of a notability guideline could possibly slant it towards a Filipino-centric sense of pseudo-notability.[25]

Kristine Mandigma, the president of the Philippine literacy advocacy group Read-or-Die Foundation, also made a commentary on WikiPilipinas after attending the service's August 22 official press launch. She described WikiPilipinas as "the online version of an omnium gatherum… a motley and captivating assortment of ideas, facts and factoids, emotions, dissertations, and agonized biographies."[26]

The site's credibility was questioned in line with a possible connection to Vibal Publishing House, a local

publishing service that was implicated in a controversial textbook scandal. Both the publishing company and WikiPilipinas are owned by the same person, Gaspar Vibal. In an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Vibal asserted that the wiki project and the publishing house were independent of each other.[27]

See also
  • List of Internet encyclopedias

References

  1. ^ a b c "WikiPilipinas: About". WikiPilipinas. August 23, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  2. ^ Dizon, David (June 12, 2008). "RP e-learning portal launched on Independence Day". abs-cbnnews.com. Archived from the original on April 7, 2013. Retrieved February 11, 2013.
  3. Manila Times. Archived from the original
    on November 10, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  4. ^ a b c Wong, Chin (September 4, 2007). "A wiki for Filipinos". Digital Life. Manila Standard Today. Retrieved September 8, 2007.
  5. ^ "WikiPilipinas Policies and Guidelines". WikiPilipinas. August 24, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  6. ^ Lim, Ronald S. (August 27, 2007). "WikiPilipinas stirs Pinoy knowledge revolution". Youth & Campus. Manila Bulletin. Archived from the original on October 31, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  7. ^ a b Estopace, Dennis (August 23, 2007). "Book trader building Pinoy online encyclopedia". Headlines. Business Mirror. Archived from the original on November 11, 2007. Retrieved August 29, 2007. Indeed, anybody with access to the Internet, has the time and temerity to write about, say, his or her clan, could contribute article/s to the WikiPilipinas's reservoir of knowledge.
  8. ^ www.yehey.com, Wiki comes to the Philippines[dead link]
  9. ^ "Business lessons from an octogenarian". Inquirer.net. April 26, 2008. Archived from the original on February 9, 2012. Retrieved February 11, 2013.
  10. ^ "isulong-seoph.aboutmyrecovery.com, WikiPilipinas Profile". Archived from the original on July 7, 2011. Retrieved April 7, 2008.
  11. ^ a b Casiraya, Lawrence (August 23, 2007). "Wikipilipinas founder aims for 'long tail' effect". Breaking News/Infotech. Inquirer.net. Archived from the original on May 15, 2010. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  12. ^ "Wikipilipinas founder aims for 'long tail' effect". Technology. Asian Journal. August 23, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  13. ^ "WikiPilipinas reaches 100,000 visitor mark in 24 Hours" (Press release). SEO Resources. August 23, 2007. Retrieved September 1, 2007.[dead link]
  14. ^ "WikiPilipinas Schedule of Activities at the 28th Manila International Book Fair from August 29 to September 2, 2007". WikiPilipinas. August 26, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  15. ^ a b c Ong, Edison D. (August 27, 2007). "Pinoy online encyclopedia WikiPilipinas aims high to break in into top 10 wikis". Info Tech. Manila Bulletin. Archived from the original on October 16, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  16. ^ Buensalido, Monique (August 31, 2007). "Wikipilipinas: Join the knowledge revolution". Young Star. Philippine Star. Archived from the original on September 26, 2007. Retrieved September 2, 2007.
  17. ^ Mike Enriquez (newscaster) (August 22, 2007). WikiPilipinas gives online info on RP (streaming video) (television production (24 Oras)). Manila, Philippines: GMANews.TV. Retrieved August 28, 2007.
  18. ^ Sheryl Yao (reporter), Arnold Clavio (newscaster) (August 23, 2007). First online encyclopedia on RP launched (streaming video) (television production (Unang Hirit)). Manila, Philippines: GMANews.TV. Retrieved August 28, 2007.
  19. ^ Wikipedia talk:Tambayan Philippines
  20. ^ Calmada, Dong B. (August 27, 2007). "Wikipilipinas: From a Wikipedia subset to one-stop hub on RP". Activism 102: An online personal track on activism of the new millennium. The Bayanihan Blog Network. Retrieved August 28, 2007.
  21. ^ Mossesgeld, Rico (July 17, 2007). "Is There Any Point to Wikipiniana?". The Bayanihan Blog Network. Archived from the original on July 31, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  22. ^ Villar, Eugene Alvin (July 19, 2007). "There is Currently No Point to Wikipiniana (aka WikiPilipinas)". Vaes9. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  23. ^ Jusay, Annalyn S. (September 3, 2007). "Wikipedia or WikiPilipinas? : the debate continues". Tech News: Blog-O-Rama. Manila Bulletin. Archived from the original on October 21, 2007. Retrieved September 5, 2007.
  24. ^ Olandres, Abraham (August 15, 2007). "Rainy Day Friday Round-up". Blogosphere. YugaTech: Philippine Technology News and Reviews. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
  25. ^ Olandres, Abe (August 31, 2007). "Will WikiPilipinas redefine what is notable?". Daily Dose. YugaTech: Philippine Technology News and Reviews. Retrieved September 1, 2007.
  26. ^ Mandigma, Kristine (August 22, 2007). "Wikipilipinas". Read or Die weblog. read-or-die.org. Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. Retrieved August 28, 2007.
  27. ^ Casiraya, Lawrence (August 26, 2007). "Wikipilipinas founder answers credibility issues". Breaking News/Infotech. Inquirer.net. Archived from the original on August 29, 2007. Retrieved August 27, 2007.
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