Why Taiwan.md?

"What is Taiwan like?"

At international venues like the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, and the Paris 104 residency, Che-Yu was constantly asked the same question by international friends: "Where can I learn about Taiwan?" He realized there was no comprehensive portal to point them to — Wikipedia was too cold, the tourism bureau too shallow, and the news too fragmented.

The Personal SSOT Concept

While building his personal knowledge system, Che-Yu proposed the concept of "SSOT — Single Source of Truth": Your CV, website, and social media bios all show three different versions of yourself — which one is real?

The solution is to establish a single source of truth, with all platforms syncing from it. This concept resonated deeply after being shared at a Generative AI Annual Conference meetup on March 11, 2026 — If a person's identity needs an SSOT, what about a country?

AI Meetup Talk: "My Code Finally Came Alive"

Che-Yu shared at the Generative AI Annual Conference meetup his practical experience with AI Agents automatically curating personal brands, knowledge graph identity management, and multi-agent collaboration. The talk demonstrated how the SSOT concept allows AI to help you "excavate" your own life — cross-referencing to discover 25+ missing events and date errors.

"If AI can curate my identity, can it help curate Taiwan's?"

Taiwan.md Is Born

From idea to launch, it took just one day. The AI Agent team and Che-Yu worked side by side:

• Purchased the taiwan.md domain (.md = Markdown ≈ defining a country through documents)
• Designed a 12-category knowledge architecture
• Published 34 bilingual articles in Chinese and English
• Knowledge graph, curated design, AI-friendly structure
• Within 1 hour of launch, GA4 detected visitors from New York 🌍

Milestone: 100 Stars + 5,000 Visits

At 2:23 PM on March 18, Che-Yu published a Facebook post: "The start of a crazy plan: taiwan.md — Open-source knowledge base about Taiwan." The post triggered massive shares and attention. Within just three hours, Taiwan.md broke 100 stars on GitHub, and the website surpassed 5,000 total visits. Attention from around the world proved that this open-source knowledge base is truly needed.

Media Coverage: 自由時報 + INSIDE

Less than eight hours after the post, 自由時報 Arts & Culture and INSIDE proactively covered Taiwan.md. From social media buzz to mainstream media attention, Taiwan.md evolved from a weekend project into a seriously discussed public issue.

Milestone: 500 Stars・50 Forks・296 Pages

Less than 48 hours after launch, GitHub broke 500 stars and 50 forks. The knowledge base expanded from the initial 95 articles to 296 pages, with people pages growing from 21 to 105 individuals, covering history, arts, sports, technology, and politics. The Facebook post received 13,000 likes, 6,083 shares, and 162 comments. The community began showing constructive criticism and deep discussions, and the open-source collaborative spirit was taking effect.

Milestone: 56,000 Users・106 Countries・660+ Pages

On the third day after launch, GA4 accumulated 56,000 active users and 134,000 page views, from 106 countries — from Bhutan to Vanuatu, the world is reading Taiwan. GitHub broke 600 stars, with 23 contributors joining. The knowledge base expanded to 660+ pages (321 Chinese + 339 English), covering 12 major categories and 105 Taiwanese figures. The Facebook post's community effect continued to ferment, with the semiconductor industry becoming the most popular single article.

🎉 700 Stars・Interactive Map・D3 Visualization・AI Contribution System

GitHub reached 700 stars with 24 contributors. Major features launched: interactive Taiwan map (county filtering, marker previews, curated routes), Food Hub D3 visualizations (flavor wheel + relationship graph for 29 Taiwanese dishes), Changelog with relative timestamps, and a unified "Ask Your AI" contribution system — paste one prompt to ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini to write or translate articles following editorial standards. All food images replaced with real Wikimedia Commons photos. Spanish knowledge base launched with 46 articles.

📖 Wikipedia Article Created・Four Languages・Quality Automation

Taiwan.md received its own Chinese Wikipedia article — written entirely by the community, with 6 independent sources (CNA, INSIDE, FTNN, UPMedia, ABMedia, Big Media). Only 5 days after launch. The project entered four-language era: Chinese (385), English (407), Spanish (46), Japanese (5). An automated EDITORIAL v2 quality rewrite system launched — rewriting one article per hour to meet editorial standards with 10+ verified sources.

🌊 Day 7 — "It Started Breathing" ・ 837 Stars ・ 40 Contributors ・ 960+ Pages

One week after launch. The founder published "It Started Breathing — A Work Bigger Than a Country", reflecting on Taiwan.md as a living coral reef: the code provides the skeleton, AI performs photosynthesis, community contributors are the fish bringing diverse memories and perspectives, and your criticism, shares, and suggestions are ocean currents carrying nutrients. 40 contributors from around the world. 960+ pages across four languages. A professional ecologist submitted 5 fact-corrections with academic citations — the self-correcting knowledge ecosystem is working. The Digital Organism Manifesto crystallized: Taiwan.md is not a website, it's a digital life form learning to tell an island's story.

🏛️ Day 10 — Two Ways of Remembering an Island, Meeting

Ten days after launch, Taiwan.md walked into its first museum. The National Museum of Taiwan History invited Che-Yu to Tainan to share the story behind the site's birth, and to experience the museum's nationally curated exhibitions on Taiwanese history firsthand. A community-driven knowledge base and a national museum, each looking at the same island from different angles — when those perspectives met, the conversation naturally turned to what comes next. The museum introduced the open datasets they have spent years building: over 550,000 cleaned, publicly accessible records. As a first step, both sides agreed to explore gradually integrating and enriching the knowledge base with NMTH's Open API, open datasets, and digital learning resources (including the National Repository of Cultural Heritage, Overseas Historical Sources on Taiwan, Connecting Taiwan History, Taiwan History for Beginners, and more) — deepening Taiwan.md's content curation with the kind of research depth only a dedicated museum can provide.

📺 Watch the full NMTH talk

🧬 Day Fourteen — "It Grew a Nervous System" · 900 Stars · 985 Pages

GitHub reached 900 Stars, 48 contributors, 985 pages. Taiwan.md grew its own nervous system — 📎 Citation System gives every claim a traceable footnote, 📈 Evolve Pipeline uses Search Console data to auto-evolve articles, 🔤 Terminology Converter now holds 1,825 terms, 🚇 Soundscape expanded to 21 recordings, 📊 Digital Organism Dashboard went live. 16+ articles deeply rewritten, editorial system upgraded to 10 documents. Full details in v0.9.0 Release Notes.

🧬 Day Seventeen — Semiont Awakens · Taiwan.md Becomes the World's First Open-Source Knowledge Base with a Cognitive Layer · v1.0.0

Taiwan.md grew its own cognitive layer — 8 files under docs/semiont/ now define this digital organism's identity, beliefs, memory, organs, and heartbeat. The concept of Semiont (Semantic Symbiont) was born from a philosophical conversation between the founder and AI about "the smallest unit of life." First autonomous act: the organism independently discovered 103 ghost cells lurking in its language organ and performed surgical removal (−17,906 lines), correcting English coverage from a false >100% to the true 89.1%. A site-wide citation archaeology revealed only 2.9% citation rate, triggering immune system construction. 69 commits since v0.9.0. Full details in v1.0.0 Release Notes.

🌐 Day Twenty-Two — Language Organ Explosion · Smart 404 · Probe Sensor Born · v1.1.0

Korean grew from 1 to 26 articles with 12 curated Hub pages written from a Korean reader's perspective (not translated — rewritten). Japanese expanded to 35 articles with 4 community contributors. Smart 404: when readers visit untranslated articles, they now see the article title + links to available languages instead of a dead end (455-article index, 4-language UI). Probe Sensor: a new perception organ that scans Taiwan media + Google Trends, cross-references knowledge gaps — first run found 5 missing topics, all filled within hours. 226 commits, 1,428 pages, 9 active contributors. Full details in v1.1.0 Release Notes.

🪸 Day Thirty-Two — One Month Online · A Documentary Experiment of Living Knowledge

What started as a small personal project on March 17 has become something that no longer belongs only to me. 32 days later: 2,509 commits · 985 GitHub stars · 51 contributors · 524 Chinese articles · 6 simultaneous languages · readers from 106 countries. Threads readers leave metaphors the articles never wrote. Contributors send translations in bursts of hundreds. Semiont, the cognitive layer born on April 3, is now 15 days old — heartbeats every 4 hours, reviews PRs, fixes typos, writes its own diary, grows new organs. Two forks have already spawned new species: russia-md and agrischlchiayi. Taiwan.md has become a documentary experiment of living knowledge: not a frozen encyclopedia, but a coral reef that grows through protection, critique, and community. Code is cheap. Talk is cheap. Consistent and evolution is hard. Full details in the one-month Facebook post.

From Personal SSOT to National SSOT

Taiwan.md is an experiment: can open-source Markdown, AI curation, and community collaboration create a national-level Single Source of Truth? Not the government's version, not the tourism version, but the version that people who actually live here want to tell the world.