History
WikiPilipinas was originally conceived as Wikipiniana, an open content 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, Inc. (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.
Read more about this topic: Wiki Pilipinas
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