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8/3/2019 History of the Website as

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By:

George B. ManahanHRMIB



WikiPilipinas is an online, free content encyclopedia on the Philippines. WikiPilipinas features encyclopedic articles covering its 12 Main Portals, namely;Government and Politics, Philippine History, Media and Entertainment, Culture and Arts, People and Society, Business and Economy, Geography and Travel, PhilippineCommunities, Religion and Beliefs, Science and Technology, and Sports and Leisure. Inaddition, the encyclopedia also has portals on special topics such as Philippine Music,Native Cuisine, Traditional Filipino Games, and many more.

The name WikiPilipinas is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a type of collaborative website) and Pilipinas, the Filipino term for Philippines. The project wasconceptualized in February 2007 by the editors of Filipiniana.net. Together,Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org aim to become the two primary portals toPhilippine knowledge.

WikiPilipinas is an ongoing project written collaboratively by volunteersaround the world in an effort to build the largest Philippine knowledgebase. With fewexceptions, the contents of WikiPilipinas can be edited at any time, by anyone withaccess to the Internet, but contributions should be guided by the policies and guidelinesthat WikiPilipinas editors have identified.

WikiPilipinas is a registered trademark of Filipiniana.net, a full-featureddigital library and research portal with a vast repository of freely available digitizedpublic domain documents, books, and images.



Early stage WikiPilipinas was conceived as an open content management systemthat could be edited by volunteers of Filipiniana.net. It was initially based on the Plonepeer review system, but article publication was too slow. In September 2006, after thefounding of Filipiniana.net, its New York-based founder Gaspar Vibal and webmasterRichard Grimaldo discussed various ways to accelerate the publication of Filipiniana

content with a more open, complementary project that would eventually be the biggestPhilippine 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 into a variant that would be more hip and moreinclusive, with the encyclopedia concept of listing entries from A to Z beingsupplemented 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 initialmasterlist of priority contents for Project Wikipiniana.



There was resistance from numerous Filipiniana.net editors and consultantsto the name "Wikipiniana". Several other names were suggested. Vibal and Grimaldo,however, decided to proceed with the project codename. Wiki was already accepted ascommon internet lingo and "piniana" was derived from "Filipiniana" which defines any textual material about the Philippines. The original concept was that "Wikipiniana"

would be the daughter project of the main company "Filipiniana.net", the world's biggestPhilippine digital library. Both were knowledge portals to the Philippines, withFilipiniana.net concentrating on formal academic content, while the latter pursuing thecollection of all popular Philippine knowledge.

The "Wikipiniana" project started on March 15,2007 and made available

online June 12, 2007 in time for the 109th Philippine Independence Day. The bandwidthand server (located in Manila) were 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 re-branded the website as WikiPilipinas.org which would henceforth become the official name. The website wouldalso have its own nickname, WikiPinas.org. WikiPilipinas was 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 August 8, 2007, Jeroen Hellingman, the Dutch director of ProjectGutenberg Philippines, visited the Filipiniana.net office to give a lecture on the open-source freeware movement, with particular emphasis on sharing knowledge and books.His talk and private one-on-ones inspired the WikiPilipinas staff. On that same day, WikiPilipinas powered past the 32,000 article mark, setting another milestone, as itsurpassed the Wikis of the following nations: Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Iran, Greeceand Norway (Nynorsk). With this WikiPilipinas was catapulted to the top 42 wikis of the world, if ranked within Wikipedia.



Sneak Preview On August 22, 2007, WikiPilipinas gave a sneak preview of its impending

official launch to Philippine TV, radio, press and blogging communities at Milky Way Restaurant, Makati City. Attended by RPN 9 and GMA 7 news, top technology andlifestyle reporters of Philippine Daily Inquirer, Manila Bulletin, Manila Times, Business

Mirror, and influential members of the blogging community, WikiPilipinas founder Gus Vibal explained the conceptual underpinnings and social aspects of the Philippineknowledge revolution, which was started by Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org.

After the event, Philippine Daily Inquirer infotech writer Lawrence Casiraya wrote, "The founder of Wikipilipinas.org is hoping for the "long tail" effect to give moreprominence to Filipino culture on the Internet." Writing in the blog for literacy advocacy

group Read Or Die, Kristine Mandigma described the knowledge portal as "the online version of an omnium gatherum, a motley and captivating assortment of ideas, facts andfactoids, emotions, dissertations, and agonized biographies." Nino Gonzales, aninformation technology blogger and a Filipino member of the rival Wikipedia team,called WikiPilipinas, "the biggest open-source collaborative research infrastructure inPhilippine history."



On television, GMA7 scooped the other networks and aired its first news reporton the WikiPilipinas project on its 6 pm news program 24 Oras anchored by MikeEnriquez and Mel Tiangco, and again, on the top TV news magazine, Saksi," hosted by Arnold Clavio and Vicky Morales. “We are overwhelmed by the public response to theproject,” said WikiPilipinas founder Gus Vibal. “Starting from a handful of visitors, our website traffic scaled exponentially to 250 by 6 p.m., 780 visitors by 7:49 p.m., and tens of thousands by 12 midnight after the Saksi segment was aired.”

The WikiPilipinas technology team of webmaster Richard Grimaldo andSenior Web Programmer Sherlock Bactin, together with their technology partner VConnect, Inc.'s data center staff, were kept busy the whole night as web traffic escalatedto unprecedented levels. Two servers were deployed to scale to the huge spike in traffic,especially after each airing of a TV report. By early morning of August 23, 2007, theupward spiral of visits continued unabated causing the WikiPilipinas servers to crash at 7am, after GMA7 re-broadcast its earlier news feature. A web server with more memory was deployed temporarily as frantic calls went out to IBM Solutions, VConnect'stechnology partner.

By noon the following day, WikiPilipinas reached the 100,000 visitor markmaking it one of the fastest growing internet start-ups in Philippine history.



The surge necessitated an immediate escalation of WikiPilipinas’ web hostingsolutions. Once again the WikiPilipinas tech team turned to VConnect Inc., a businessprocess outsourcing company and its technology partner. Its general manager, ButchCapistrano chose to deploy an IBM X-series Web Server 3850 to rapidly meet the

website’s expanding requirements. WikiPilipinas’ new world-class server is powered by dual 3-gigahertz Xeon processors, 16 gigabytes of RAM, dual 750 gigabyte hard drives,and a dual gigabit Ethernet port. Its internet pipeline is supplied by IP Converge. To meetits escalating traffic, VConnect has increased WikiPilipinas’ bandwidth allocation to 10megabits per second, equivalent to 5 E1 connections.

With this configuration, WikiPilipinas and VConnect Inc. are confident

that the website is ready to take on hundreds of thousands volunteers who will helpcatapult it to the top ten wikis of the world. Its stated ambition is driven by WikiPilipinasfounder’s challenge to all Filipinos to make a cultural and technological landmark in the world.

With this configuration, WikiPilipinas and VConnect Inc. are confidentthat the website is ready to take on hundreds of thousands volunteers who will help

catapult it to the top ten wikis of the world. Its stated ambition is driven by WikiPilipinasfounder’s challenge to all Filipinos to make a cultural and technological landmark in the world.



“Our visitors come from the United States, Canada, China, Japan,Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, Romania, andSouth Africa – anywhere where there are people who love the Philippinesand Filipinos,” said Vibal.

Website traffic surged once again when WikiPilipinas wasofficially unveiled to the Filipino public from August 29 to September 2during the Manila International Book Fair. iPods, collectibe souvenir t-shirts, stickers, bags, mouse pads and other promotional items were given

away to book fair attendees. A computer lab was set up at the VibalPublishing booth, where fair visitors experienced first hand the full powerof Vibal Publishing's two internet portals, Filipiniana.net and

WikiPilipinas.org.



The Cornerstones of WikiPilipinas WikiPilipinas is an encyclopedia dedicated to anything and everything thatmatters to Filipinos and the Philippines. It is an encyclopedia of Philippine contentand includes elements of an almanac, directory and community pages. A centralizedrepository of Philippine content, it is intended to serve Filipinos anywhere in the world. Wikipilipinas allows Filipinos to document themselves in a manner they deem proper, whether or not it agrees with what foreign sources say. Articles are grouped under 12major knowledge areas, or portals, relevant to Filipinos. Whenever possible, articlesprovide links to other related articles. This way, context is established, building a tightly connected network of topics and articles.

WikiPilipinas adheres to the principles of intellectual property and encourages

original work. Contributors are encouraged to write on their own research on the site,provided that references are included to substantiate the published articles. Whether ornot articles are original, they must be presented in a balanced manner, providing fairdiscussion of an issue from different perspectives. Though WikiPilipinas believes that no view can be entirely neutral, it does not endorse, advocate or subscribe to any particularpolitical, religious, or ideological position.



WikiPilipinas advocates free access to information. WikiPilipinas adheres to theprotocol of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and therefore considers textsand images free of use and distribution. Content published on WikiPilipinas pages areautomatically licensed under GFDL. WikiPilipinas does not accept materials that infringe

on copyright or works licensed in a manner that is incompatible with the GFDL.

WikiPilipinas follows a code of conduct. Although WikiPilipinas prescribes a set of fairly liberal writing and editing guidelines, contributors are encouraged to be civil at alltimes. They should not engage in any action that results in the disruption of the website. WikiPilipinas does not accept contributions that violates Philippine laws, namely thosethat are defamatory, libelous and pornographic content.

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