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WikiPilipinas Profile
WikiPilipinas is an online, free content encyclopedia on the Philippines. In addition to encyclopedic entries in history, culture, sports, politics, and other knowledge areas, WikiPilipinas also features the following components:
- • A Who’s Who of prominent and ordinary Filipinos
• A directory of schools, corporations, government institutions, and more
• An almanac of useful and interesting records and data on the Philippines
• A community portal for discussing and preserving the heritage of Tsinoys, Filipino-Americans, Hispano-Filipinos, Moros, indigenous people, and other, similar groups in the Philippines
WikiPilipinas is an ongoing project written collaboratively by Philippine volunteers around the world in an effort to build the largest Philippine knowledgebase. With few exceptions, the contents of WikiPilipinas can be edited at any time, by anyone with access to the Internet, but contributions should be guided by the policies and guidelines that WikiPilipinas editors have identified. In this respect, WikiPilipinas is similar to Wikipedia; however, WikiPilipinas differs from Wikipedia in some very important ways.
WikiPilipinas is a registered trademark of Filipiniana.net, a full-featured digital library and research portal with a vast repository of freely available digitized public domain documents, books, and images.
WikiPilipinas history
On February 14,2007, WikiPilipinas was conceived as an open content management system that could be edited by volunteers of Filipiniana.net. It was initially based on the Plone peer review system, but article publication was too slow. In September 2006, after the founding of Filipiniana.net, its New York-based founder Gaspar Vibal and webmaster Richard Grimaldo discussed various ways to accelerate the publication of Filipiniana content with a more open, complementary project that would eventually be the biggest Philippine knowledgebase.
On February 13, 2007, Grimaldo presented the Philippine Wiki project to Vibal, based on the Wikipedia model. Both agreed that the technology foundation MediaWiki would be an excellent platform, but felt they could improve on Wikipedia’s original vision. Vibal, after years of perusing the Wikipedia site had many ideas on transforming the formal encyclopedia project to be some variant that would be hipper and freer, with the encyclopedia concept of listing entries from A to Z being supplemented with an almanac of lists and a directory style listing a la Yahoo.com or Yehey.com. Immediately after the presentation, 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.
There was resistance from numerous Filipiniana.net editors and consultants to the name “Wikipiniana”. There were several other names suggested, however, Vibal and Grimaldo decided to proceed with the project codename. Wiki was already accepted as common internet lingo and “piniana” was rooted from “Filipiniana” which defines any textual material about the Philippines. The original concept was that “Wikipiniana” would be the sister project of the main company “Filipiniana.net”, the world’s biggest Philippine digital library. Both were knowledge portals to the Philippines, with Filipiniana.net concentrating on formal academic content, while the latter pursuing the collection of all popular Philippine knowledge.
The “Wikipiniana” project started on March 15, 2007 and made available online June 12, 2007 during the 109th year Philippine Independence Day. The bandwidth and server (located in Manila) was supplied by VConnect, the technology partner of Filipiniana.net. On July 1, 2007, the milestone of 20,000 articles was reached.
On July 7, 2007, the editorial team rebranded the website as WikiPilipinas.org which would henceforth become the official name. The website would also have its own nickname, WikiPinas.org. WikiPilipinas would become the global domain name, and several other multilingual microwebsites were registered with the internet registrar: WikiPhilippines, for articles in English, and WikiFilipinas for articles in Spanish.
On July 17,2007, the milestone of 25,000 articles was achieved, setting an all-time record: 5,000 articles added in just 17 days, or roughly 300 encyclopedia entries a day. In just four months, the wiki had grown from nothing to become the world’s biggest online Philippine encyclopedia. On August 8, 2007, WikiPilipinas surpassed the benchmark of 32,000 articles, catapulting it to the top 42 wikis of the world if ranked within Wikipedia. To date, WikiPilipinas has surpassed the wiki sites of Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Thailand, Iran, Greece, and Norway (Nynorsk).
WikiPilipinas Contents
Contents of WikiPilipinas were aggregated from the Philippine articles of Wikipedia but were updated and expanded inside the WikiPilipinas. The WikiPilipinas team is building vast lists of specialized insider knowledge about the Philippines. Its biggest article collections are the Who’s Who of the Philippines, Philippine Georgraphical Gazetter, Philippine Cultural Encyclopedia, Philippine Historical Encyclopedia, Philippine TV and Movie Database, Pinoy Komiks Database, Philippine Almanac of Lists, Philippine Websites Database, Philippine Writers Database, Philippine Sports Almanac, Filipino First Almanac, Philippine Photography Knowledgebase and more.
With the same copyleft principle of Wikipedia, all the text in WikiPilipinas, and most of the images and other content, are also covered by the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Articles are freely contributed to the project, while the GFDL license ensures the content will remain freely distributable and reproducible (see the copyright notice and the content disclaimer for more information).
Who writes for WikiPilipinas?
There are dedicated editors– everyone from expert scholars to casual readers who are assigned to each particular knowledge area. Anyone who visits the site can edit it, and this has encouraged contribution of a tremendous amount of content. There are mechanisms that help community members watch for bad edits, administrators with special powers to enforce good behavior, and a judicial committee which considers the few situations remaining unresolved and decides on withdrawal or restriction of editing privileges or other punishments when needed, after all other consensus remedies have been tried. The site is owned by WikiPilipinas.org, which is partially involved in daily operation and writing.
Exploring WikiPilipinas
WikiPilipinas aims to serve its visitors who come to the site to acquire knowledge, as well as others who come to share knowledge. As it builds the contents, hundreds of articles are being improved, and has showcase Featured Articles on the main page. You can view the changes by clicking the Recent changes page. You also can view Random articles to updated the latest activity of the site. Over 26,000 articles have been already uploaded by the WikiPilipinas community.
WikiPilipinas eventually will evolve into a multilingual encyclopedia by localizing contents written in 8 major languages. All of these will be maintained, updated, and managed by separate communities, and will include thought-provoking information and articles which can be hard to find through other common sources.
FOR MORE INFORMATION, visit www.wikipilipinas.org. For press inquiries, please contact Julius Corotan (0906 6230 702, e-mail jules@vibalpublishing.com) or Rio Brigino (0927 452 7021, e-mail rio@vibalpublishing.com)
