MANILA, Philippines — The founder of Wikipilipinas.org is hoping for the “long tail” effect to give more prominence to Filipino culture on the Internet.

Going live in June coinciding with the country’s Independence Day, Wikipilipinas takes after online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org and aims to become a major information portal about the Philippines.

Founder Gaspar Vibal is confident the site has a good chance of being ranked among the top country “wikis” alongside those by the Americans, French, Chinese, Spanish and Swedes.

The site currently contains more than 30,000 entries, most of which were contributed by members of Vibal Foundation, a group under local publisher Vibal Publishing.

Raising the total to more than 100,000 articles will make Wikipilipinas one of the biggest repositories of information about a particular culture, in this case about Filipinos.

The site uses the same open-source technology of Wikipedia and subscribes to the same “copyleft” principle applying the GNU Free Documentation, which means content is freely distributed and reproduced.

“As an information resource, it caters to every Filipino anywhere in the world that owns any device that can connect to the Internet,” Vibal said during the site’s launch.

As demonstrated by Wikipedia, wikis derive their power as a medium for distributing information through collective efforts of people who contribute pieces of information.

The long tail phenomenon, as described by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson, applies to sites like Amazon.com that harness user communities to make popular items that otherwise are unpopular commercially.

Applied to Wikipilipinas, Vibal said the site allows every Filipino to become publishers in their own right.

“A culture is measured by the amount of information that exists about it. Right now, we are ranked outside of the top 40 wikis with more entries than countries like Thailand, Malaysia or Norway,” said Vibal, who has publishing experience in New York.

Prior to Wikipilipinas, he also started Filipiniana.net, another portal that’s more “scholarly” in content and offers free online access to rare, unpublished and out-of-print books and materials on Philippine studies.