My fellow Wikipedian TheCoffee has spotted in a locally-produced coffee table book what appears to be plagiarism of text from Wikipedia. The book, titled Central Philippines, seems to be a tourism-oriented book containing pictures taken in and around the Visayas with brief introductory prose of the constituent provinces. It is these introductions that manifest the plagiarism. TheCoffee gave an example of Negros Oriental from the book:

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Remember the Wikimedia illustration-for-pay project I blogged about last year? Hmmm, maybe not. (So read that blog post! Go on. I’ll wait.) anyway, the first round of illustration requests started last month and will run until early October. There are 50 needed illustrations in various fields such as biology (jellyfish cross-section), mathematics (Császár polyhedron), engineering (airborne wind turbine), and computer science (application virtualization). All but two of the illustrations will have a payout of $40 while the remaining will be worth $15.

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Shown above is the Cebu International Convention Center in Mandaue City where the first ever Philippine Open Source Summit will be held. The Summit will happen on June 23 to 24—that’s next week, Monday and Tuesday. Surprisingly, Microsoft Philippines is a major sponsor of the said summit so it’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft can contribute to the Open Source Community. (It’s also expected that there will be discussions and debates regarding Microsoft’s Office Open XML, an XML-based format for office documents that got ISO standardization early this year amid numerous controversies.)

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かわいい! Meet Wikipe-tan. She’s the unofficial mascot and moe anthropomorph of Wikipedia. Here, she’s wearing the baro’t saya, the female national costume of the Philippines. Isn’t that cute?

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Two weekends ago, I finally got around to creating the locator maps of the municipalities of Dinagat Islands, the newest province of the Philippines that seceded from Surigao del Norte in 2006, for use in Wikipedia. Locator maps are maps that show the where a place is in a larger area. In this particular case, I am showing the location of the municipality within the province of Dinagat Islands. Shown below is a rendering of the locator map for the town of Tubajon.

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Did that title rattle you? Was your grammar/spelling Nazi evil twin awakened by it? If yes, then you’re not alone. Filipino Wikipedians on the English Wikipedia had a long-running debate this year regarding the name of the Philippine currency and what to name the corresponding Wikipedia article.

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In an announcement that’s sure to raise a whole lot of questions, the Wikimedia Foundation (the organization that handles Wikipedia as well as other free-content websites like Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikiquote) has resolved that it has received a $20,000 grant from Philip Greenspun, an Internet entrepreneur, to create various free-licensed illustrations for use on Wikipedia and other websites.

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Nope, that title you read above is not a critical opinion. It’s a statement of fact enshrined in WikiPilipinas’ Policies and Guidelines. As Mr. Gus Vibal, the founder of Filipiniana.net and WikiPilipinas, has said, WikiPilipinas is envisioned to be the one-stop-shop for all things popular and Pinoy. There you can find articles like the “Cutest PBA Players” or “Top 10 Philippine Female Movie Villains”, which while definitely are interesting to read, is of dubious value in an academic context. Hence the “not an academic encyclopedia” description.

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It’s been a rainy week this week, and it seems the Filipino’s collective prayer for rain to stave of the impending water crisis worked. Well, it did cause a helluva lot of traffic last Wednesday, but at least we’re all safe, right?

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The title above is my answer to the question, “Is there any point to Wikipiniana?” over at the main blog of the Bayanihan Blog Network. Well, what the heck is Wikipiniana? Wikipiniana (recently rebranded as WikiPilipinas) aims to be the largest online Philippine encyclopedia, written by Filipinos. Currently having more than 25,000 articles, most of them stubs (short placeholder information about the topic), Wikipiniana uses the same collaborative wiki model employed by Wikipedia, currently the largest online encyclopedia.

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A top editor of Wikipedia was forced to resign his positions of authority amidst community outrage that he has been contributing under false pretenses. This scandal is possibly Wikipedia’s biggest test of credibility since the Seigenthaler controversy two years ago. See more coverage on Google News and Technorati.

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Last weekend, I played around with the public domain data obtained by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission or SRTM. I wanted to use this data to create topographic maps that I can contribute to Wikipedia.

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