Encyclopedia of Taiwan

» see taiwanpedia.culture.tw as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Taiwan's Council for Cultural Affairs opened 臺灣大百科全書 on 18 January 2005. The idea underneath it was older than the website. A twenty-volume printed encyclopedia of Taiwan, budgeted at NT$520 million, is the kind of thing a state commissions when it wants a permanent record of what it is, and the web version was how that record was going to be assembled.

It shipped in two halves. The professional edition was written by commissioned experts and contracted out to a subsidiary of Yuan-Liou Publishing for NT$30 million. The public edition was the open half, built on Web 2.0 principles, run alongside the Taiwan Twenty-first Century Agenda Association and available for anyone to write and edit.

The plan called for fifteen categories and 15,036 entries. The public sent in 11,793 submissions and 10,648 of those cleared review, along with 8,929 images. The licensing moved with the decade: GNU Free Documentation License from 2007, then Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 from 2009.

What reaches me from Taiwan is hardware. I have been buying Taiwanese motherboards and reading Taiwanese chipset documentation since I was a teenager, and that is the entire relationship. A Chinese-language civic encyclopedia funded by a ministry in Taipei was never going to cross that particular bridge.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two encyclopedias under one name ~

Running an expert edition and an open edition side by side sounds like a hedge and it worked like one. The expert half gave the project the authority a government wants attached to its name. The open half gave it volume, and the look of a country writing itself down.

The catch sat in the review queue. Every public entry was checked before it went live, which is the reverse of how the wiki it was competing with worked, and a 90 percent pass rate suggests the filter was a light one. It still meant that writing for 臺灣大百科全書 was submitting something rather than publishing it, while Chinese-language Wikipedia grew through the same decade asking nothing of anybody.

~ where the entries went ~

In June 2014 the Ministry of Culture stopped accepting contributions and moved the entries into the 國家文化資料庫, the National Cultural Database, which pools material from the cultural institutions under the ministry. The website itself closed on 15 July 2014. Nothing was thrown away. The entries were an asset on a ministry's books and they went onto another shelf, which is a quieter ending than most sites of that vintage got.

taiwanpedia.culture.tw does not resolve today. The content survives inside a database run by the department that paid for it, searchable, and no longer anybody's to edit. Nine and a half years of a country writing itself down ended as a data migration.

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