User talk:Nino Gonzales/wikiphilippines

Hi Nino, what a very interesting article. I like your viewpoints, even though I may not agree with all of them. But I do admire people with strong opinions. I am Gus Vibal, the founder of both Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas.org. I have been following your blog and Tambayan postings.

I am very honored that you like the kind of stuff that we publish on FilNet (that is our short name for the parent company | Filipiniana.net). Like you I am a history buff. I love researching and working with academicians and historians. In fact I am in touch with dozens of them every day. We have a couple of projects lined up with very grand sounding names: 100 Tagalog Novels, 100 Cebuano Novels, Archivo General de Filipinas (Spanish archive of the Philippines), 100 Pinoy Komiks, Batasan.org (a Philippine legal database), PremioZobel.org (Hispanic literature in the Philippines), Virtual Blair and Robertson, | Virtual Philippine Revolutionary Records, Digital Katipunan, Virtual 1872, | Master Union Bibliography of the Philippines, etc).

All of these projects inform our efforts at our newest and biggest project WikiPilipinas.org (for the English-speaking world WikiPhilippines; for the Spanish-speaking world WikiFilipinas, and of course the microwebsites in the 8 major Philippine languages).

Let me clarify one thing: we are not trying to supplant Wikipedia Philippines. WikiPilipinas (as well as Filipiniana.net) was born out of the same Web 2.0 concepts as Wikipedia: copyleft, free and unlimited distribution, open source colloboration, etc. Wikipedia and WikiPilipinas are spiritual siblings. I do not see how WikiPilipinas threatens the existence of Wikipedia Philippines. Both can co-exist peacefully with each other. The choice is up to any Filipinist as to where they want to go.

If they want scholarly and academic content they are free to hang out at |Filipiniana.net. If they want access to popular or publicly received knowledge they could choose to hang out at Wikipedia or | WikiPilipinas.org. Everybody will be happy because he or she will have a choice.

The two Philippine wikis have the same conceptual underpinnings, as well as the same technology platform MediaWiki. But having said that, let me explain to you how WikiPilipinas departs from the Wikipedia model:

1) WikiPilipinas is a universalist encyclopedia, not a prescriptive one. That is we do not prescribe or proscribe what kind of encyclopedic articles are contributed to it. You will not have talk pages on a Tambayan forum as to whether the Vito Cruz LRT Station should receive FA status. If a volunteer wants to contribute an article called "Top 10 Cutest PBA Players", then so be it. WikiPilipinas is not an academic encyclopedia and we are not aspiring to be Encyclopedia Britannica or Wikipedia.  We define ourselves as an encyclopedia only because we have the ability to sort articles from A to Z. As long as the submitted articles do not violate our policies against libel, articles of prurient interest, malicious content, re-use of copyrighted material, or vandalism, the article will stand in WikiPilipinas.

2) Secondly WikiPilipinas aspires to be more than just an encyclopedia. You will see from our many users' contributions that they are building databases or directories. If you browse the | About Us section you will see a list of our forthcoming listings: Pinoy Komiks Database, Philippine TV and Movie Database, Philippine Sports Almanac, Philippine Writers Directory, Who's Who of the Philippines, Philippine Tourist Guide and the list goes on. For a sample of what the users are writing please browse | WikiPilipinas Recent Changes. WikiPilipinas is not in the business of saying which Filipino is notable enough to be included in its encyclopedic listings, it's that simple. If someone wants to include all the cast members of Pinoy Big Brother, then so be it.

3) Third WikiPilipinas aspires to be a community of communities. Whereas Wikipedians have only one community, we want to create many communities living within WikiPilipinas. That is we want to create portal pages for specific communities: Tsinoy, Filhispano, Filipino Americans, Moro, etc. We will soon be launching a how-to section on our website explaining how to use our Wiki to create your own community portal.

4) Lastly we do have three counter-opposed editorial policies:

a) We do not require a so-called "Neutral Point of View" [NPOV] in any of our articles. In our philosophy it is okay to have a specific point of view. We encourage our writers to be bold and to have strong points of view. But we will also ask them to balance whatever strong opinions they have against the counter arguments of their opposition, because extremely biased articles will in the long run be edited toward moderation by any community of users. But instead of prohibiting our users from having strong opinions we encourage them instead to make "balanced presentations". I always laugh when I encounter this NPOV gobbledygook in Wikipedia guidelines. I personally believe that it is impossible for any writer to feign a "neutral point of view."  Everything that we write is always out of the prism of our minds, which are conditioned by our education, family background and culture.  I always get the giggles when a Wikipedian gets prissy or angry when he or she tries to edit a "NPOV" into a user's article, for this whole nonsense of NPOV has just been perpetuated by Wikipedians and Jim Wales to disguise the fact that almost all the articles in Wikipedia are written from a Western point of view. (Of course most people who have access to English language website on the Internet are either Americans or Europeans!)

b) We do not have any prohibition on "original research" [OR]. We encourage users to write original research as long as they follow the guidelines that their college professor always insist on: back everything up with references! For an example of what I mean please browse the following recently posted articles on WikiPilipinas:


 * |Unusual Sex Practices of Early Filipinos
 * | History of Pinoy Komiks, please compare via-a-vis Wikipedia's own take on Komiks
 * |History of the Tuason Family

c) Although we envision ourselves as an encyclopedia, we also aspire to be a magazine, that is, out of the database of thousands of articles, we have editorial meetings where we choose to showcase which nuggets of knowledge are to be highlighted. In other words we speak to a perceived audience and we feel strongly accoutable to them by studying where they click and what more they would like to read. While Wikipedia portals are very static and boring, we choose to insert ourselves into our reader's life by editorializing depending on whim, season or timely relevance. I think our | home page with its twelve knowledge portals and its directory listing and almanac of records and data clearly reflect what we are trying to do: a balancing act between information and entertainment. After all WikiPilipinas is not just about databasing all popular Philippine. Our editorial team has a right just like any Philippine newspaper or magazine such as Sunday Inquirer, Philippine Tatler, or Metro to make editorial judgements about which articles to feature on its home page. We don't just want to be a compendium of knowledge; we actually want to be judged as interesting. The key is in mixing high and low culture articles that will capture the attention of the reading public. If any reader should want real research material that they can use to submit to their professor, they are still only one click away from surfing our other "academic" portal Filipiniana.net. As many of the Philippine Wikipedians have pointed out on the Tambayan forum, every single page of Wikipedia and WikiPilipinas is littered with disclaimers. Articles found in either wiki should only be the starting point for research. I doubt very much whether a university professor would be pleased with a student who submits a research paper littered with Wikipedia references! Lastly I doubt very much whether a true scholar with an academic reputation would voluntarily put a lifetime's research work into a wiki article. Why would anyone put his or her nuggets of wisdom into an encyclopedia which could be mercilessly edited or vandalized by anybody?

Filipiniana.net has a two-pronged strategy: a research-based website also called | Filipiniana.net and a popular knowledge portal | WikiPilipinas.org. With free access to both, the Filipino user has the best of both worlds.

In summary: with its two major projects, Filipiniana.net is building the two biggest knowledge databases of the Philippines. One |(the Filipiniana.net website) is dedicated to free online access to rare, arcane, out-of-print or unpublished materials in Philippine studies. This is to place where you can place all your scholarly stuff. (Please note that voluntary user contributions are vetted against our editorial team and peer reviewed by academicians, so therefore it is not a completely Web 2.0 vehicle.)

The second | (WikiPilipinas) is devoted to collecting popoularly received knowledge and has already become the world's largest popular Philippine encyclopedia with currently more than 29,000 articles. Its stated goal is to publish more than 100,000 articles, vaulting WikiPilipinas to the top 10 Wikis of the world, behind the English, German, Polish, Japanese, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish and Portuguese wikis. With the help of the country's fastest-growing knowledge community, together these two knowledge portals will become the world's largest repositories on Philippine history, culture and civilization.

We invite you as well as all Philippine Wikipedians to discover the WikiPilipinas advantage and we will be honored when you attend not only our official launch, but also that of Filipiniana.net at the | Manila International Book Fair, from August 29 to September 2 at the World Trade Center. We will be premiering four short films about our 2 knowledge portals and there will be lots of giveaways, including special souvenir T-shirts, USB drives, universal card readers, and iPods to boot!

We not only believe that competition brings out the best in all of us but we also welcome all avenues of cooperation. We would be very honored to host | The Second Wiki Philippines Meetup at one of the World Trade Center function rooms] where, if you like, after your meeting, you could have a personal "open the kimono" "no holds barred" presentation of all our knowledge portals.

Gus Vibal, founder, WikiPilipinas.org and Filipiniana.net

NPOV: A joke?
When people poke fun at NPOV with the reasons they state, they actually do not know anything about NPOV. While individual authors/editors may not be neutral, the articles themselves should be "neutral" in a sense that all significant viewpoints are represented. That's the essence of NPOV and something lost upon Mr. Vibal. (Though he is entitled to his own opinion, of course.) --seav 01:51, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

NPOV gobbledygook
I can't make any sense in Mr Vibal's attitude towards NPOV. "We encourage our writers to be bold and to have strong points of view. But we will also ask them to balance whatever strong opinions they have against the counter arguments of their opposition." Surely that's the definition of NPOV?

He complains that, "almost all the articles in Wikipedia are written from a Western point of view", then stomps off and starts his own site. Fair enough if it were true, but where's the evidence? There seem to be plenty of Filipino contributors to Wikipedia - do they all have a Western point of view? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Thinginblack (talk • contribs) 05:18, 15 September 2007 (UTC)