Wiki Pilipinas - Impact and Public Reaction

Impact and Public Reaction

WikiPilipinas has been the subject of several articles by major broadsheet 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 Filipino bloggers questioned the usefulness of WikiPilipinas as a fork of Wikipedia. In a post entitled "Is There Any Point to Wikipiniana?", a Filipino blogger 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 web 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.