Encyclopedia of Taiwan: A NT$500-Million National Knowledge Dream

30-second overview:
The "Encyclopedia of Taiwan" launched in 2004 was a milestone in Taiwan's attempt to establish cultural subjectivity, with a total budget of NT$520 million. The project began with the ambitious vision of publisher Wang Jung-wen — originally conceived at NT$1.4 billion, encompassing 30 large volumes, 100,000 entries, and an English edition — but in actual implementation, it repeatedly oscillated between the "authority" of expert review and the "freedom" of online collaboration. After three system iterations (proprietary, MediaWiki, standalone), evolving licensing regimes (GFDL to CC), and a scaled-back print publication plan, the standalone website closed on July 15, 2014, and its content was merged into the National Cultural Heritage Database. The experiment proved a point about the state's role in the digital age: the shift from attempting to monopolize "authoritative definitions" to providing "open materials" for public and AI collaboration.

"President Chen always believed we should have an 'Encyclopedia of Taiwan' — an encyclopedia that faithfully captures the currents of the times and the spirit of the Taiwanese people." ¹ On May 13, 2004, then-president Chen Shui-bian, in issue 135 of his e-newsletter, formally elevated the compilation of an encyclopedia to the level of national strategy, emphasizing its importance as "a comprehensive search engine for researching Taiwan" and "a knowledge collection of Taiwan's culture." ¹²

This NT$500-million project was a high-stakes gamble on "Taiwan's right to define its own narrative." As a sub-project of the "National Digital Archives Program," it was closely connected with the state's then-current push for digitization, cultural and creative industries, and open data policy. ²

The Vision: A Publisher's NT$1.4-Billion Grand Blueprint

The soul of this massive undertaking was Wang Jung-wen, chairman of Yuan-Liou Publishing Company. For him, an encyclopedia was the ultimate publisher's badge of honor. Wang's initial vision was extraordinarily ambitious: he hoped to complete the online Chinese edition within 4 years, the online English edition within 5 years, and a print edition within 6 years — at least 30 large volumes, 50 million Chinese characters, with 10,000 sets printed and donated to schools and international institutions. ²

The content target included a clear knowledge tree structure (Propedia) and at least 100,000 entries. Using the budget for revising the 16th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a reference, he estimated a six-year total budget of NT$1.4 billion and recommended establishing a foundation for long-term maintenance. ² To ensure authority, Nobel laureate Lee Yuan-tseh was recruited in May 2007 to serve as General Editor-in-Chief of the Editorial Committee. ¹³

Yet reality fell significantly short of the ideal. The actual total budget was approximately NT$520 million. ¹ The original plan to publish 20 print volumes by 2008 ultimately saw only the first 6 volumes completed by Yuan-Liou's subsidiary "Sinobooks" (智慧藏學習科技), while large-scale print publication never materialized on schedule. ¹²⁴

📝 Curator's note: When a publisher's dream met the national budget, the gamble seemed to have the strongest possible backing — but it was destined to negotiate for a decade with bureaucracy, technological change, and community culture.

The Turning Points: Three System Iterations and the Tug-of-War Over Licensing

The project initially adopted a strategy of launching the "public edition" first, going through three major technological system iterations and licensing evolutions:

1. Proprietary system (launched January 2005): Operated by the Taiwan 21st Century Agenda Association. Registration required users to submit their name, phone number, and even their National ID number, raising serious privacy concerns. ¹² The early policy of "paying a fee for each submission that passed review" caused a massive influx of entries, severely delaying the review schedule. ⁵
2. MediaWiki system (revised 2007): The website switched to MediaWiki, adopting the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). ² During this period, the high openness of the system led to "almost no checking of user content," and plagiarism and copyright infringement became rampant — the project's greatest quality crisis. ¹²
3. Standalone system (revised October 2009): To resolve infringement and quality issues, the site was redesigned again as a standalone system (taiwanpedia.culture.tw), with licensing adjusted to CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 Creative Commons, clearly establishing an "open but non-commercial" stance. ¹²

"Members of the public who enjoy using the internet tend to reject having official authorities direct the writing and reviewing of knowledge." ⁵ This was the consensus reached in 2006 when the Council for Cultural Affairs (now the Ministry of Culture) convened expert scholars for consultation. Experts' concerns about "removing review mechanisms" went beyond authority — they also worried that the project's "Taiwan-centric perspective" might be diluted by noise. ²

The Output: Knowledge Production in a Pyramid Style

Despite a turbulent process, the Encyclopedia of Taiwan left a valuable academic legacy. The professional edition emphasized a "pyramid writing style": the opening three sentences must contain concrete facts, followed by accessible explanation, with further reading provided at the end. ⁶ The project systematically organized 16 subject areas of Taiwan's history, geography, folk customs, and literature, among others, in the mid-to-late 2000s. ⁵⁷

📝 Curator's note: The most precious thing about this encyclopedia isn't the NT$500 million — it's that it forced subject experts across every field, during the early days of digital transformation, to conduct a thorough knowledge assessment of Taiwan, and to attempt interaction with the online community.

The End: Digital Withdrawal in 2014 and a Paradigm Shift

In June 2014, the Ministry of Culture formally merged the Encyclopedia of Taiwan entries into the National Cultural Heritage Database (nrch.culture.tw), no longer open to community collaboration. ¹² On July 15, 2014, the standalone website officially closed. ¹²

This was a pivotal turning point: the state chose to acknowledge the limitations of maintaining a single authoritative encyclopedia in the Web 2.0 era, and instead repositioned the content as part of "open data." Today, these entries have been integrated into the "National Cultural Memory Database 2.0," shifting from "expert-defined canon" to "public materials repository," incorporating NLP and AI applications and emphasizing the sharing and re-creation of "cultural DNA." ⁸⁹

Challenges and Controversies: The New Battlefield for Knowledge Sovereignty

This knowledge war has not ended. In late 2025, the Encyclopaedia Sinica (中國大百科全書出版社) published a 960,000-character Encyclopedia of Taiwan: History, emphasizing the "one China principle." ¹⁰ This proves that when we do not define ourselves, others will define us.

The future of Taiwan's knowledge sovereignty perhaps lies not in a "national canonical encyclopedia" but in how to make locally produced content effectively visible and maintained on global platforms — such as Wikipedia and AI large language models. This costly NT$500-million experiment left a profound lesson: the state's most appropriate role is as guardian of foundational archives and open data, not as the monopolist of knowledge interpretation.

📝 Curator's note: This experiment demonstrated that the state is suited to doing foundational archives and open data, not monopolizing canonical definitions. In the age of distributed collaboration, knowledge derives its vitality from openness, not control.

Further Reading

• Ministry of Culture (文化部) — the government body that led this project
• Wikipedia (維基百科) — the concurrent Web 2.0 collaborative encyclopedia paradigm
• National Cultural Memory Database (國家文化記憶庫) — the successor platform that received this project's entries

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