WikiPilipinas

» see en.wikipilipinas.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

It was conceived in late 2006 under the name Wikipiniana, as a way to let volunteers at a Philippine research portal called Filipiniana.net write faster than the Plone system they were using allowed. In September 2006 the plan switched to MediaWiki. The project formally started on 15 March 2007 and went live three months later, on 12 June, which the Philippines observes as Independence Day. The name changed to WikiPilipinas on 7 July, less than a month in.

Behind it was Gaspar Vibal of Vibal Publishing House, a Manila textbook publisher, working with a webmaster named Richard Grimaldo and a managing editor named Alfred Ursua. The seed content was roughly fifteen thousand Philippine articles forked out of the English Wikipedia. Everything after that was written locally.

The launch worked. A press preview on 22 August 2007 pulled in the television networks and the Manila broadsheets along with a room full of bloggers, and the site claimed a hundred thousand visitors off the coverage. A surge in traffic forced a hardware upgrade within weeks, onto an IBM server with sixteen gigabytes of RAM and a ten megabit line from a local provider. The formal launch came at the 28th Manila International Book Fair later that month.

Filipino Wikipedians objected almost immediately, and their objection was the obvious one. Eugene Alvin Villar argued in July 2007 that an encyclopedia by Filipinos for Filipinos that explicitly rejected neutrality would produce biased articles, and that effort spent there would rank worse in search than the same effort spent on Wikipedia. Abraham Olandres added that without a notability rule the site would slide into a homemade sense of who counts.

~ the chronicle ~

~ hip and free ~

The tagline was the free and hip Philippine encyclopedia, and the policy page said in as many words that it was not an academic encyclopedia. Where Wikipedia forbids original research, WikiPilipinas asked for it: present your own research and findings on the site. Where Wikipedia requires a neutral point of view, WikiPilipinas said it did not believe any view could ever be neutral and asked for balance instead. There was no notability threshold, and no conflict-of-interest rule stopping you writing about yourself or your family.

What grew out of that policy was a national scrapbook. Alongside history and politics it carried a who's who of prominent Filipinos, a directory of companies and institutions, an almanac, portals for individual ethnic groups, sections in Tagalog, and an agony-aunt column with a cartoon mascot. Kristine Mandigma, who ran a literacy foundation, described it after the press launch as an omnium gatherum, a motley assortment of ideas and factoids and agonized biographies. She was not being unkind and she was not wrong.

The content moved from the GNU Free Documentation License to Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike on 26 March 2011. A sister project, e-turo.org, launched on 12 June 2008 to put lesson plans online for Philippine teachers.

~ the silent years ~

There is no closure notice, no final blog post, no press item. What exists is the crawl record. The wiki ran on /index.php/ paths into 2017 and was rebuilt at some point onto /view/ paths, which is why the front page looks abandoned in the archive for three years while the articles underneath were being captured steadily through 2021, 2022 and into 2023. Anyone reading only the homepage captures would date the death six years early, and I nearly did.

On 22 May 2023 the crawler starts collecting five hundred-level errors from the article paths, then recovers; the last page that loads cleanly is a town article captured on 29 May 2023. By 26 January 2024 every article URL returns a 404. The domain is still registered through June 2027 and still has an address record, and nothing answers on it. Sixteen years of Philippine writing that was, by design, nowhere else.

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