This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Philippine Wikimedia Community User Group, a registered non-stock non-profit organization dedicated to promoting unrestricted access to knowledge within and beyond the archipelago. This article is the first part of a 3-part series on the PhilWiki Community’s 10 Milestones, celebrating 10 amazing years.
On 1 June 2015, just before the world agreed to take action against climate change, Filipino cultural activists and open-content contributors Irvin Sto, Tomas, and Gil L. Gregorio, along with London-based Philippine languages advocate Stephen Fung, embarked on a quest to promote the free knowledge movement in the country. This was the birth of the PhilWiki Community, which would become a Wikimedia affiliate organization in the East, Southeast, and Pacific (ESEAP) region.
Based in the city of Naga, approximately 238 miles away from the capital Manila, the Philippine Wikimedia affiliate works to ensure that knowledge is accessible to Filipinos, regardless of socio-economic status, language, or ethnicity, by supporting and growing Wikipedia and its sister projects.
It leads various activities in different parts of the country, promoting Wikimedia as open educational resources, and it also organizes training conferences for open-content contributors, partnering with educational and cultural institutions and mission-aligned organizations.
During its first year as a civic organization, it supported various outreach activities including the Waray Wikipedia workshops in the Eastern Visayas Region organized by the Sinirangan Bisaya Wikimedia Community, the Rinconada Bikol Wikipedia project and the Wiki Takes Rinconada photo scavenger hunt in partnership with the City Government of Iriga, and the distribution of offline Wikipedia DVD copies at Department of Education (DepEd) Minalabac District in Camarines Sur.
From 2016-2019 and 2022, the PhilWiki Community sent Ramon Olaño Jr., Irvin Sto. Tomas, Steven Fung, and Johnny Alegre as its delegates at the Wikimedia Conference / Wikimedia Summit in Berlin. The annual meeting of all Wikimedia organizations, as well as other committees, discussed the future of the Wikimedia movement in terms of collaboration, organizational structure, and development. The conference was hosted and organized by Wikimedia Deutschland in cooperation with the Wikimedia Foundation.
CC BY-SA 4.0)
Photo by Filipinayzd (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Today, the organization is headed by Maffeth Opiana Sto. Tomas, an incorporator of PhilWiki Community and an active Wikipedia contributor who teaches at DepEd Naga City Division. Leah Banastao Sumalinog, a university lecturer at Central Bicol State University of Agriculture, serves as the chairperson of the 5-member board of trustees. The three other board members are heritage advocate Bernadette F. Roco, senior high school teacher Marife Altabano, and Marvin Molin, a university personnel and an active Wikimedia Commons contributor.
The organization has grown from three to 45 regular and associate members from Camarines Sur, Albay, Ilocos Norte, Isabela, Aklan, Cebu, and Metro Manila. It also has 60 community members from other parts of the country and overseas.
(Photo by Alvin Casitas, CC BY-SA 4.0)
10 MILESTONES OF THE PHILWIKI COMMUNITY
Here are the major achievements of the Philippine Wikimedia Community User Group in the last decade:
1 – Bikol Wikipedia as the most vibrant among the local Wikipedia editions
One of the PhilWiki Community’s specific objectives is to promote and increase the daily use of Philippine languages, and deploy Wikipedia as a resource and medium for the dissemination of open knowledge and learning through these languages. Furthermore, it represents and supports the activities of the eight Philippine language-based Wikipedia editions, among other local Wikimedia projects, in the country’s most widely spoken but nevertheless marginalized languages.
In March 2025, Bikol Wikipedia reached the 19,000th article, up from 12,900 articles last March 2022. Over 6,000 new articles were contributed to the local Wikipedia edition in 3 years, surpassing all eight Philippine language-based Wikipedia editions. Thanks to the dedicated volunteer contributors. Back in 2009, Sumaro Bikolnon members Ramon Olaño Jr., Gil L. Gregorio and Irvin Sto. Tomas formed the Bikol Wikipedia Community, a support group for the local Wikipedia.
The relevance of Bikol Wikipedia only became apparent during the implementation of Mother Tongue-based Multilingual Education under the K-12 Curriculum, as well as during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic when DepEd implemented the modular distance learning modality. The free online encyclopedia was among the open-content resources heavily utilized by the DepEd-Bicol Regional Office, particularly in the Araling Panlipunan 5 textbook published in 2016, and in various self-learning modules for elementary and secondary levels in 2021.
In 2020, Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom was piloted in three countries: Bolivia, Morocco, and the Philippines. The pilot initiative focused heavily on collaboration between civil society actors in the open knowledge sector, secondary school teachers, and government authorities. It was conducted in partnership with Wikimedistas de Bolivia, Wikimedia MA User Group, PhilWiki Community, and the Pasay City School District. The training resources and sessions were adapted to the needs of the local context in our three pilot countries. The Wikimedia Foundation’s flagship teacher training program promotes a critical engagement with Wikipedia that allows teachers to leverage its use as a pedagogical tool. Through a collaboratively-developed curriculum, teachers explore and reflect on the different features that make Wikipedia a valuable ally to their classroom practice.
2 – Bikol WikiConference led to the creation of local extracurricular Wikimedia organizations
During the 15th anniversary celebration of Bikol Wikipedia, more than 50 educators and youth officials from the city of Naga gathered for Bikol WikiConference 2023, a training conference on Wikipedia and Education Collaboration. As a result, extracurricular Wikimedia organizations and partnerships were established in different educational institutions. These extracurricular organizations, called Wiki clubs, work on fun and interactive activities wherein participants learn how to collaborate in building content on the local Wikipedia and its sister projects. Wikimedia outreach activities involve students, faculty, alumni, and Wikipedians in residence.
The PhilWiki Community relaunched its education program as Wiki Education Philippines (Wiki Edu PH), encompassing the different initiatives of the group under one name. Currently, the PH-WC Education program committee is headed by Marife Altabano, a senior high school teacher at Cararayan National High School (CNHS).
Inspired by Wikimedia Armenia’s Lernapat WikiClub, the CBSUA Wiki Club became the first Wikimedia organization for state college students in the Philippines, formed in October 2023. Two more Wiki clubs were formed, the CNHS Wiki Club was organized for senior high school learners in December 2023, and the University of Nueva Caceres (UNC) Wiki Club for BS Architecture majors in July 2024. The Wiki Club Minalabac was organized by educators in February 2024 supporting the promotion of open educational resources in the academe and beyond in Minalabac, Camarines Sur.
As early as 2015, the PhilWiki Community has been conducting advocacy and outreach activities at various academic institutions. These activities include distribution of offline Wikipedia DVD copies (2015) and Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom modules (2021) to public elementary and secondary schools at DepEd Camarines Sur Division, and conducting seminars and training at DepEd Catanduanes Division (2019) and DepEd Naga City Division (2023). Anniversary celebrations of the Bikol Wikipedia have been held at the Ateneo de Naga University and Central Bicol State University of Agriculture. The University of Nueva Caceres hosted the 1lib1ref campaign in 2019, Wikimania satellite local event (2022) and Wikisource seminars (2023). Some faculty and alumni of CNHS and CBSUA started to participate in the Wiki Loves Earth PH in 2018 and WikiGap PH campaign in 2020.
The PhilWiki Community and Bikol Wikipedia Community jointly recognized five (5) institutional partners at the culminating event of Bikol Wikipedia’s 15th year celebration, namely: Raul S. Roco Library-City Government of Naga, Fr. James O’Brien SJ Library-Ateneo de Naga University, University of Nueva Caceres, Sumaro Bikolnon and the Nueva Caceres Heritage Movement Inc. (NCHMI).
New linkages and networks have been created with the Center for Rinconada Culture and the Arts at Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges (CSPC), the Center for Partido Studies at Partido State University (ParSU), the ADNU Social Sciences Department and the UNC College of Architecture and Engineering.
3 – Implementation of the first Wiki Edu PH Program at CBSUA
The first year of implementation of the Wiki Education at Central Bicol State University of Agriculture was a huge success in integrating Wikimedia into its instruction, research, and extension programs. The first of its kind in the Philippines, CBSUA Wiki Education is a joint program of the Bikol Wikipedia Community, the PhilWiki Community, and of the CBSUA-Calabanga International Relations Office under the direction of Jerome Hipolito.
Numerous collaborations had been made, both on and off campus, since the signing of the activity agreement in October 2023. Among these activities are the two editions of LitFest, which included a competition in translating and writing Wikipedia articles.
Twenty-seven (27) students from the College of Education and the College Arts and Sciences received certification from the PhilWiki Community for completing the Wikipedia Training Course covering topics such as Basic Overview of Wikipedia’s Core Policies and Guidelines, Editing Basic Sources and Citations, Plagiarism and Copyright Violation, Contributing Images and Media Files, and Translating Articles. Meanwhile, around 20 students majoring in BS Education participated in capacity-building activities with heritage and cultural advocates in building Wikisource during the Bikol Wikisource Training of Trainers held in Naga City. Six graduating students finished the Wiki OJT program, an initiative of CBSUA-Calabanga.
To date, over 20 club members from its three campuses are actively involved in the activities of CBSUA Wiki Club. Several CBSUA personnel and Wiki Club members have also received training conference scholarships at the ESEAP Strategy Summit (Bangkok, 2018), ESEAP Conference (Sydney, 2022), WikiCommons PH Conference (Naga, 2023) and GLAM Wiki Conference Philippines (Vigan, 2024).
End of Part 1. This article is a 3-part series on the PhilWiki Community’s 10 Milestones, celebrating 10 amazing years.
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