WikiPilipinas
Encyclopedia
WikiPilipinas is an online
, free content
website
which bills itself as a combination "non-academic encyclopedia
", web portal
, directory
and almanac
for Philippine
-based knowledge. Like Wikipedia
, it contains various articles on Philippine-related topics. Unlike Wikipedia, many of the articles cover topics that would otherwise be deemed unencyclopedic by the stricter Wikipedia. The service for example, promotes the concept of original research and eschews the larger encyclopedia's 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 the 7th of July. The service was formally launched at the 28th Manila International Book Fair in late August of the same year.
, WikiPilipinas does not fancy itself an "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 multi-racial 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.
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."
describes "improvements" including a directory
of portals
based on those of Yahoo!
, Inc., and community portals for Filipino ethnic groups. WikiPilipinas guidelines explicitly encourage, "balanced presentation, but not a neutral point of view.", state that WikiPilipinas, "does not believe that any view can ever be neutral" and that fair discussion of an issue is expected. One of the key pillars of Wikipedia is that articles be written from a neutral point of view, a major difference in encyclopedia
models. WikiPilipinas supports the concept of original research, something Wikipedia forbids. WikiPilipinas encourages users to, "present their own research and findings on the site" and expects adequate references from editors for factual information. In addition, the site does not have the Wikipedia:Notability concept that is another cornerstone of Wikipedia. Articles about practically anything are allowed on the site. Also, WikiPilipinas' conceptualization is far removed from that of an academic encyclopedia
. The site's policy and guideline page states, "WikiPilipinas is not an academic encyclopedia." Unlike Wikipedia with its strict conflict of interest
policy, WikiPilipinas has no rule preventing one from writing about oneself or one's family.
(GFDL).
management system
for volunteer members of the Philippine online resource Filipiniana.net
. The site initially used the Plone content management system the production of articles was deemed too slow under the system. In September 2006, plans to shift the system to use the wiki
-model were conceived (after the founding of Filipiniana.net) by its New York-based founder Gaspar Vibal and webmaster
Richard Grimaldo. Octogenarian book publisher Esther A. Vibal, founder of Vibal Publishing House (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.
The actual conceptualization of WikiPilipinas (then-Wikipiniana) occurred in February 2007. In planning, MediaWiki
was officially selected to be the site's platform and it was decided that the site were to be modeled after the Wikipedia
. Instead of a complete fork of Wikipedia however, Wikipiniana was to be a "hipper" and "freer" version, including almanac
lists and directories. 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.
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 Independence Day
. A month after going live, the official name of the service was changed from Wikipiniana to WikiPilipinas on July 7. WikiPhilippines was the term decided upon for the section of the site with articles in English and WikiFilipinas for the section in Spanish
. A press-oriented sneak preview of the site was hosted for the local media on August 22 of the same year. The event was attended by major Philippine media outlets such as GMA-7 and RPN-9, print media like the Manila Bulletin
, the Philippine Daily Inquirer
and the Manila Times
and dozens of Philippine bloggers. 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.
WikiPilipinas had its official launch during the 28th Manila International Book Fair in early September 2007.
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.
s are situated in Manila
in the Philippines. The site was originally hosted on the servers of its sister project, Filipiniana.net
. However, a surge of viewers following intense media coverage on August 21, 2007 prompted the site's owners to turn to VConnect Inc. to upgrade the site's hardware. WikiPilipinas is now hosted on an IBM System x 3850
with dual 3 gigahertz Intel Xeon
CPUs, 16 gigabyte
s of RAM
and 1.4 terabyte
s of combined hard drive space. The site's internet connection is provided by IP Converge with a total bandwidth
allocation of 10 Mbit/s.
newspapers in the Philippines
. The service itself has been covered by GMA Network
news in segments on two of the station's daily news programs.
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."
Upon learning of its inception, a few Filipinos bloggers questioned the usefulness of WikiPilipinas as a fork of Wikipedia. In a post entitled "Is There Any Point to Wikipiniana?", a Filipino
blog
ger weighed the pros and cons of having an encyclopedia administered to entirely by Filipinos. Filipino blogger and wikipedian Eugene Alvin Villar questioned the usefulness and purpose of WikiPilipinas in a blog post on July 19, 2007. He argued that the "hip and free encyclopedia"'s policy on articles not needing to adhere to a neutral point of view (as Wikipedia does) was not conducive to an unbiased encyclopedia. With WikiPilipinas being marketed as an encyclopedia "by Filipinos, for Filipinos," Villar pointed out the great possibility of bias in the encyclopedia's articles. Aside from the possibility of bias, he also mentioned that the articles of WikiPilipinas were less likely to rank
higher than those of the English Wikipedia
in Internet searches, making effort spent in updating WikiPilipinas articles better spent working on their equivalent Wikipedia articles. 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. 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". 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.
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."
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.
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
, free content
Free content
Free content, or free information, is any kind of functional work, artwork, or other creative content that meets the definition of a free cultural work...
website
Website
A website, also written as Web site, web site, or simply site, is a collection of related web pages containing images, videos or other digital assets. A website is hosted on at least one web server, accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network through an Internet...
which bills itself as a combination "non-academic encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
", web portal
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
, directory
Directory
Directory may refer to:* Directory , or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files* Directory , stored information about a database...
and almanac
Almanac
An almanac is an annual publication that includes information such as weather forecasts, farmers' planting dates, and tide tables, containing tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar etc...
for Philippine
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
-based knowledge. Like Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, it contains various articles on Philippine-related topics. Unlike Wikipedia, many of the articles cover topics that would otherwise be deemed unencyclopedic by the stricter Wikipedia. The service for example, promotes the concept of original research and eschews the larger encyclopedia's neutral point-of-view principle.
Conceived in late 2006 by Philippine publishing magnate Gaspar Vibal
Gaspar Vibal
Gaspar A. Vibal is the executive director of Vibal Foundation. As book collector , he pioneered the creation of Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org, two of the foundation's flagship projects...
, 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 the 7th of July. 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 fork of WikipediaWikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
, WikiPilipinas does not fancy itself an "academic encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
" 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
Almanac
An almanac is an annual publication that includes information such as weather forecasts, farmers' planting dates, and tide tables, containing tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar etc...
of the Philippines and a multi-racial community portal
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
for the different ethnic groups in the Philippines. As an online resource using the wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
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
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
. However, editors must register before they are allowed to edit.
Gaspar Vibal
Gaspar A. Vibal is the executive director of Vibal Foundation. As book collector , he pioneered the creation of Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org, two of the foundation's flagship projects...
and his mother) made a historical move in Philippine education
Education in the Philippines
During the period of governance of Spain and the United States, education in the Philippines changed radically, mostly modeled on the system of education in the United States of the time...
, when it also launched on June 12, 2008, the 110th Philippine Declaration of Independence
Philippine Declaration of Independence
The Philippine Declaration of Independence occurred on June 12, 1898 in Cavite II el Viejo , Cavite, Philippines. With the public reading of the Act of the Declaration of Independence, Filipino revolutionary forces under General Emilio Aguinaldo proclaimed the sovereignty and independence of the...
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
Department of Education (Philippines)
The Department of Education , is the executive department of the Philippine government responsible for the management and governing of the Philippine system of basic education. It is the chief formulator of Philippine educational policy and is responsible for the Philippine primary and secondary...
-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."
Differences from Wikipedia
Although it is modeled after Wikipedia, WikiPilipinas differs from it in distinct ways. Founder Gaspar VibalGaspar Vibal
Gaspar A. Vibal is the executive director of Vibal Foundation. As book collector , he pioneered the creation of Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org, two of the foundation's flagship projects...
describes "improvements" including a directory
Directory
Directory may refer to:* Directory , or folder, a file system structure in which to store computer files* Directory , stored information about a database...
of portals
Web portal
A web portal or links page is a web site that functions as a point of access to information in the World Wide Web. A portal presents information from diverse sources in a unified way....
based on those of Yahoo!
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
, Inc., and community portals for Filipino ethnic groups. WikiPilipinas guidelines explicitly encourage, "balanced presentation, but not a neutral point of view.", state that WikiPilipinas, "does not believe that any view can ever be neutral" and that fair discussion of an issue is expected. One of the key pillars of Wikipedia is that articles be written from a neutral point of view, a major difference in encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
models. WikiPilipinas supports the concept of original research, something Wikipedia forbids. WikiPilipinas encourages users to, "present their own research and findings on the site" and expects adequate references from editors for factual information. In addition, the site does not have the Wikipedia:Notability concept that is another cornerstone of Wikipedia. Articles about practically anything are allowed on the site. Also, WikiPilipinas' conceptualization is far removed from that of an academic encyclopedia
Encyclopedia
An encyclopedia is a type of reference work, a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge....
. The site's policy and guideline page states, "WikiPilipinas is not an academic encyclopedia." Unlike Wikipedia with its strict conflict of interest
Conflict of interest
A conflict of interest occurs when an individual or organization is involved in multiple interests, one of which could possibly corrupt the motivation for an act in the other....
policy, WikiPilipinas has no rule preventing one from writing about oneself or one's family.
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. All text in WikiPilipinas is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation LicenseGNU Free Documentation License
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, and modify a work and requires all copies and...
(GFDL).
History
WikiPilipinas was originally conceived as Wikipiniana, an open contentOpen content
Open content or OpenContent is a neologism coined by David Wiley in 1998 which describes a creative work that others can copy or modify. The term evokes open source, which is a related concept in software....
management system
Management system
A management system is the framework of processes and procedures used to ensure that an organization can fulfill all tasks required to achieve its objectives....
for volunteer members of the Philippine online resource Filipiniana.net
Filipiniana
Filipiniana, based on the definition by Isagani Medina from “Collection Building: Filipiniana,” in his In Developing Special Library Collections, Filipiniana: Proceedings , refers to Philippine-related books and non-book materials...
. The site initially used the Plone content management system the production of articles was deemed too slow under the system. In September 2006, plans to shift the system to use the wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
-model were conceived (after the founding of Filipiniana.net) by its New York-based founder Gaspar Vibal and webmaster
Webmaster
A webmaster , also called a web architect, web developer, site author, or website administrator is a person responsible for maintaining one or many websites...
Richard Grimaldo. Octogenarian book publisher Esther A. Vibal, founder of Vibal Publishing House (VPHI), and mother of Gaspar Vibal
Gaspar Vibal
Gaspar A. Vibal is the executive director of Vibal Foundation. As book collector , he pioneered the creation of Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org, two of the foundation's flagship projects...
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.
The actual conceptualization of WikiPilipinas (then-Wikipiniana) occurred in February 2007. In planning, MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
was officially selected to be the site's platform and it was decided that the site were to be modeled after the Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
. Instead of a complete fork of Wikipedia however, Wikipiniana was to be a "hipper" and "freer" version, including almanac
Almanac
An almanac is an annual publication that includes information such as weather forecasts, farmers' planting dates, and tide tables, containing tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar etc...
lists and directories. 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.
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 Independence Day
Independence Day (Philippines)
In the Philippines, Independence Day is an annual national holiday observed on June 12, commemorating the Philippine Declaration of Independence from Spain on June 12, 1898. It is the National Day of the Philippines....
. A month after going live, the official name of the service was changed from Wikipiniana to WikiPilipinas on July 7. WikiPhilippines was the term decided upon for the section of the site with articles in English and WikiFilipinas for the section in Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
. A press-oriented sneak preview of the site was hosted for the local media on August 22 of the same year. The event was attended by major Philippine media outlets such as GMA-7 and RPN-9, print media like the Manila Bulletin
Manila Bulletin
The Manila Bulletin , is the Philippines' largest broadsheet newspaper by circulation, followed by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It bills itself as "The Nation's Leading Newspaper", which is its official slogan...
, the Philippine Daily Inquirer
Philippine Daily Inquirer
The Philippine Daily Inquirer, popularly known as the Inquirer, is the most widely read broadsheet newspaper in the Philippines, with a daily circulation of 260,000 copies. It is one of the Philippines' newspapers of record...
and the Manila Times
Manila Times
The Manila Times is the oldest existing English language newspaper in the Philippines. It is published daily by The Manila Times Publishing Corp. with editorial and administrative offices at 371 A...
and dozens of Philippine bloggers. 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.
WikiPilipinas had its official launch during the 28th Manila International Book Fair in early September 2007.
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
Filipiniana
Filipiniana, based on the definition by Isagani Medina from “Collection Building: Filipiniana,” in his In Developing Special Library Collections, Filipiniana: Proceedings , refers to Philippine-related books and non-book materials...
, a Philippine-oriented research portal.
Technical specifications
As a Philippine company, the site's physical serverServer (computing)
In the context of client-server architecture, a server is a computer program running to serve the requests of other programs, the "clients". Thus, the "server" performs some computational task on behalf of "clients"...
s are situated in Manila
Manila
Manila is the capital of the Philippines. It is one of the sixteen cities forming Metro Manila.Manila is located on the eastern shores of Manila Bay and is bordered by Navotas and Caloocan to the north, Quezon City to the northeast, San Juan and Mandaluyong to the east, Makati on the southeast,...
in the Philippines. The site was originally hosted on the servers of its sister project, Filipiniana.net
Filipiniana
Filipiniana, based on the definition by Isagani Medina from “Collection Building: Filipiniana,” in his In Developing Special Library Collections, Filipiniana: Proceedings , refers to Philippine-related books and non-book materials...
. However, a surge of viewers following intense media coverage on August 21, 2007 prompted the site's owners to turn to VConnect Inc. to upgrade the site's hardware. WikiPilipinas is now hosted on an IBM System x 3850
IBM System x
The IBM System x computers form a sub-brand of International Business Machines System brand servers...
with dual 3 gigahertz Intel Xeon
Xeon
The Xeon is a brand of multiprocessing- or multi-socket-capable x86 microprocessors from Intel Corporation targeted at the non-consumer server, workstation and embedded system markets.-Overview:...
CPUs, 16 gigabyte
Gigabyte
The gigabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information storage. The prefix giga means 109 in the International System of Units , therefore 1 gigabyte is...
s of RAM
Ram
-Animals:*Ram, an uncastrated male sheep*Ram cichlid, a species of freshwater fish endemic to Colombia and Venezuela-Military:*Battering ram*Ramming, a military tactic in which one vehicle runs into another...
and 1.4 terabyte
Terabyte
The terabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. The prefix tera means 1012 in the International System of Units , and therefore 1 terabyte is , or 1 trillion bytes, or 1000 gigabytes. 1 terabyte in binary prefixes is 0.9095 tebibytes, or 931.32 gibibytes...
s of combined hard drive space. The site's internet connection is provided by IP Converge with a total bandwidth
Bandwidth (computing)
In computer networking and computer science, bandwidth, network bandwidth, data bandwidth, or digital bandwidth is a measure of available or consumed data communication resources expressed in bits/second or multiples of it .Note that in textbooks on wireless communications, modem data transmission,...
allocation of 10 Mbit/s.
Impact and public reaction
WikiPilipinas has been the subject of several articles by major broadsheetBroadsheet
Broadsheet is the largest of the various newspaper formats and is characterized by long vertical pages . The term derives from types of popular prints usually just of a single sheet, sold on the streets and containing various types of material, from ballads to political satire. The first broadsheet...
newspapers in the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
. The service itself has been covered by GMA Network
GMA Network
GMA Network is a major commercial television & radio network in the Philippines. GMA Network is owned by GMA Network, Inc. a publicly listed company...
news in segments on two of the station's daily news programs.
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."
Upon learning of its inception, a few Filipinos bloggers questioned the usefulness of WikiPilipinas as a fork of Wikipedia. In a post entitled "Is There Any Point to Wikipiniana?", a Filipino
Filipino people
The Filipino people or Filipinos are an Austronesian ethnic group native to the islands of the Philippines. There are about 92 million Filipinos in the Philippines, and about 11 million living outside the Philippines ....
blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
ger weighed the pros and cons of having an encyclopedia administered to entirely by Filipinos. Filipino blogger and wikipedian Eugene Alvin Villar questioned the usefulness and purpose of WikiPilipinas in a blog post on July 19, 2007. He argued that the "hip and free encyclopedia"'s policy on articles not needing to adhere to a neutral point of view (as Wikipedia does) was not conducive to an unbiased encyclopedia. With WikiPilipinas being marketed as an encyclopedia "by Filipinos, for Filipinos," Villar pointed out the great possibility of bias in the encyclopedia's articles. Aside from the possibility of bias, he also mentioned that the articles of WikiPilipinas were less likely to rank
PageRank
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set...
higher than those of the English Wikipedia
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
in Internet searches, making effort spent in updating WikiPilipinas articles better spent working on their equivalent Wikipedia articles. He later reiterated some of these concerns in an interview with the Manila Bulletin
Manila Bulletin
The Manila Bulletin , is the Philippines' largest broadsheet newspaper by circulation, followed by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It bills itself as "The Nation's Leading Newspaper", which is its official slogan...
in September. In the interview, he criticized WikiPilipinas for prioritizing publicity over streamlining the site's policies and guidelines. 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". 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.
Kristine Mandigma, the president of the Philippine literacy
Literacy
Literacy has traditionally been described as the ability to read for knowledge, write coherently and think critically about printed material.Literacy represents the lifelong, intellectual process of gaining meaning from print...
advocacy
Advocacy
Advocacy is a political process by an individual or a large group which normally aims to influence public-policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions; it may be motivated from moral, ethical or faith principles or simply to protect an...
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."
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
Gaspar Vibal
Gaspar A. Vibal is the executive director of Vibal Foundation. As book collector , he pioneered the creation of Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org, two of the foundation's flagship projects...
. In an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer
Philippine Daily Inquirer
The Philippine Daily Inquirer, popularly known as the Inquirer, is the most widely read broadsheet newspaper in the Philippines, with a daily circulation of 260,000 copies. It is one of the Philippines' newspapers of record...
, Vibal asserted that the wiki project and the publishing house were independent of each other.