A few days from now (on June 25, 2008, to be exact), the Cebuano Wikipedia would be 3 years old. It was one of the last batch of Wikipedias to be approved using the old system of Wikipedia creation; now it is more difficult to create a Wikipedia. I was the one who proposed its creation and consequently became its bureaucrat.
My earliest, most difficult, and most lingering problem was how to increase the visibility of the Cebuano Wikipedia. Since Cebuano is not in the taught in the schools of the Philippines, and most Cebuanos who has access to the Internet can speak English anyway (and even blog in English, just like me :-)), there had never been a "real" need for a Cebuano encyclopedia, much less online.
My disillusionment with the low statistics lead me to use a bot to stuff "encyclopedic articles" artificially into the Cebuano Wikipedia. Over a course of two months, we jumped from about a hundred articles to more than thirty thousand...
And lost credibility in the process. We were removed from the portal of most Wikipedias when their communities realized the artificial stuffing. Of all the community members, I was the most disheartened, leading me to find other avenues for my online life. Little by little I gradually eased my responsibilities from the Cebuano Wikipedia, and although I am nominally a bureaucrat in the project, much of the control doesn't belong to me any more.
