Wiki Pilipinas - Overview

Overview

While it started as a fork of Wikipedia, WikiPilipinas does not fancy itself an "academic encyclopedia" as stated in its official policies and guidelines page. Despite this, the online resource does contain articles on encyclopedic topics such as history, culture, sports, and politics. In addition to those mentioned, WikiPilipinas styles itself as a mash-up of several entities; a "Who's Who" of prominent Filipinos, a directory of institutions and companies, an almanac of the Philippines and a community portal for the different ethnic groups in the Philippines. As an online resource using the wiki model, it bills itself as a collaborative effort-content provider. The most major goal that the wiki has stated is "to build the largest Philippine knowledge database". Like Wikipedia, the contents of WikiPilipinas are open to editing by anyone with access to the Internet. However, editors must register before they are allowed to edit.

WikiPilipinas was particularly launched by the Vibal Foundation, a nonprofit organization which previously created Filipiniana.net, and WikiPilipinas.org (a reference guide on the Philippines). Conjunctively, the Vibal Foundation (per Gaspar Vibal and his mother) made a historical move in Philippine education, when it also launched on June 12, 2008, the 110th Philippine Declaration of Independence day, e-turo.org, as conduit of these 3 landmark education tools. Tin Mandigma, editor-in-chief of E-turo.org explained that it is an e-learning portal which "seeks to provide free and quality learning materials online to teachers and students; it gives teachers access to lesson plans and modules based on textbook materials published by Vibal Publishing House, Inc. amid plans to offer Department of Education-approved content from various learning institutions as supplementary teaching materials. One of the most common complaints of teachers is that while the Internet has so much information, most of it cannot be adapted to the local classroom. With this project, we hope to help teachers sort through the clutter and give them quality information that would be useful for their students."