A Knowledge Base for Taiwan
A Taiwanese new media artist has built what he calls an open-source README for his country — a structured, AI-readable knowledge base about Taiwan that went from concept to live website in a single day.
Launched on March 18 by Che-Yu Wu (吳哲宇), the project is called Taiwan.md. The name is a deliberate double meaning: .md is the file extension for Markdown, the plain-text format widely used in software documentation and increasingly favored by AI language models as a knowledge input. As Taiwanese tech outlet Insight noted, everything from GitHub documentation to publicly released model guides from OpenAI and Meta is written and maintained in Markdown.
The underlying idea borrows a concept from software engineering: SSOT, or Single Source of Truth — the master record that every other version syncs to, one authoritative file rather than a dozen contradictory copies. Wu applied this logic to national identity. Taiwan’s story, he argued, was scattered across Wikipedia summaries, tourism brochures, and news fragments — never assembled into a coherent, Taiwan-authored account. The site now runs to 960-plus pages across four languages, covering history, culture, food, economics, and notable figures, open for anyone to contribute to under a Creative Commons license.
The timing is pointed. As generative AI systems become default gateways to knowledge, the format and provenance of source material increasingly determine whose version of events gets surfaced. Markdown’s clean structure is particularly legible to large language models. “In the age of AI,” Wu has said, “whoever controls structured, high-quality content controls the power of narrative.”
