The Korean Wikipedia is the Korean language edition of the Wikipedia. It was founded in October 2002 and reached ten thousand articles on 4 June 2005. As of , it has articles with active users and is the 23rd largest Wikipedia.
History
The Korean Wikipedia initially used an older version of MediaWiki. The software had problems representing Hangul, which limited usage. In August 2002, the software was upgraded and started to support non-English scripts such as Hangul. However, Internet Explorer continued to have an encoding problem, which kept contributions to the encyclopedia low. Nevertheless, from October 2002 to July 2003, the number of articles increased from 13 to 159, and in August 2003 it reached 348. Finally, in September 2003 the hangul problem was solved. From September 2003, with no accessing difficulty once the encoding error in IE was solved, the number of contributions and visits increased. The Korean Wikipedia's prospects became even more optimistic following the momentum created by substantial coverage in the Korean media. The Korean Wikipedia won the Information Trust Award in the general Internet culture branch in 2005.
Statistics
Topics
In 2019 the Korean Wikipedia has 269 thousand unique categories and 7.73% of them do not have appropriate page in the category namespace. The average article in this language version has 10 categories, while number of unique categories per articles ratio is 0.596. The largest number of articles has Politics and People category. In Korean Wikipedia articles related to Military and Philosophy has the highest average quality. Content about Business is read more often and articles in People category have the highest authors' interest on average.
The Korean Wikipedia is written almost entirely in hangul. Hanja is only used in order to clarify certain phrases, and is usually parenthesized. There is a group, named :ko:사용자:Yes0song/다지모|Dajimo, that is actively working to introduce a mixed script system to the Korean Wikipedia. A request for a separate Wikipedia in mixed script, however, was rejected.
Dialects
There are two major standards in the Korean language, the South Korea standard, and the North Korea standard. North Koreans are underrepresented on the Korean Wikipedia, due to North Korean censorship of the Internet in North Korea. Therefore, most users of the Korean Wikipedia are South Koreans and most articles are written in the South Korean style. The official name of the Wikipedia is 한국어 위키백과 Hangugeo Wiki-baekgwa. Hangugeo is the name for the Korean language in South Korea, and baekgwa is a clipped form of 백과사전 baekgwasajeon "encyclopedia".
Services derived from Korean Wikipedia
Businesses heavily make use of the Korean Wikipedia in various ways, for its license, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License, allows modification and distribution for commercial purpose. Empas integrated the Korean Wikipedia database in its search since 11 August 2005. The feature to search Korean Wikipedia using a mobile phone with a wireless Internet connection through Nate was available to the subscribers of SK Telecom from 6 July 2007. Since 21 August, Daum mirrored Korean Wikipedia and English Wikipedia on its portal, and Naver also started to present the search results from the Korean and English Wikipedia prior to others from 11 January 2008.
Politics
The South Korean right-wing youth group story K favors a proactive involvement of right-wing media establishments for the Korean Wikipedia. Despite the South Korean conservative New Rights establishments pressured the government to approve the term, liberal democracy, to represent South Korea in Korean history textbooks, the head of the National Institute of Korean History, Lee Tae-jin, proposed to use this political term by citing the Korean version of Wikipedia as a main source. Human rights groups have sent copies of the Korean Wikipedia to North Korea on USB sticksby balloon.
