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The Korean Wikipedia (Korean: 한국어 위키백과) is the Korean language edition of Wikipedia. It was founded on 11 October 2002. As of January 2025, it is the 2nd largest Korean language Wiki site[1] and the 23rd largest Wikipedia, with 694,995 articles and 1,806 active users.[2]
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.[3] However, Internet Explorer continued to have an encoding problem, which kept contributions to the encyclopedia low.[4] 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.
It reached ten thousand articles on 4 June 2005.[5] The Korean Wikipedia won the Information Trust Award in the general Internet culture branch in 2005.[citation needed][importance?]
Comparisons to other Korean wikis and information services
Korean Wikipedia is the 2nd largest Korean language wiki, and the 33th most visited website of 2024 according to Similarweb.[6] It is behind Namuwiki, in terms of both traffic (Namuwiki is fifth, compared to Korean wikipedia's thirty third) and article count (including redirects), where Namuwiki (6,525,085 articles) has almost double (1.98 times) the articles of Korean Wikipedia (3,290,720), as of October 5th, 2024.[7][8] According to The Hankyoreh, Namuwiki has 7.2 times more traffic compared to the Korean Wikipedia as of October 2024.[1] It is generally attributed that Korean Wikipedia is less substantive and influential compared to NamuWiki.[1]
Jimmy Wales stated that in other countries, models like Wikipedia were first introduced during the early stages of the internet, leading to very enthusiastic responses. In contrast, in South Korea, because other collective collaboration services such as Naver's Jisik-in (지식인), a Quora style ask-and-answer website, were already available, leading it to receive much more lackluster responses.[9]
The Korean Wikipedia is written almost entirely in hangul. Hanja is only used in order to clarify certain phrases, and is usually parenthesized. A group named Dajimo worked to introduce a mixed script system to the Korean Wikipedia. A request for a separate Wikipedia in mixed script, however, was rejected.[10]
There are two major standards in the Korean language: the South Korea standard, and the North Korea standard.[11] North Koreans are underrepresented on the Korean Wikipedia due to 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 위키백과Hangugeo Wiki-baekgwa. Hangugeo is the name for the Korean language in South Korea, and baekgwa is a clipped form of 백과사전baekgwasajeon "encyclopedia". The name of the Korean Wikipedia, following the North Korean standard, would be 조선말위끼백과 .
Services derived from Korean Wikipedia
Businesses heavily make use of the Korean Wikipedia in various ways since its license, the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License (CC BY-SA), allows modification and distribution for commercial purposes.
Empas integrated the Korean Wikipedia database in its search since 11 August 2005.[12] 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.[13] Since 21 August, Daum mirrored Korean Wikipedia and English Wikipedia on its portal,[14] and Naver also started to present the search results from the Korean and English Wikipedia prior to others from 11 January 2008.[15]
Politics
The South Korean right-wing youth group story K favors proactive involvement in contributing to Korean Wikipedia.[16][17]
Human rights groups have sent copies of the Korean Wikipedia to North Korea on USB sticks by balloon.[18]
Gallery
Korean Wikipedia's 30,000 article logo (14 December 2006)
Korean Wikipedia's 40,000 article logo (2 August 2007)
Korean Wikipedia's 50,000 article logo (4 January 2008)
Korean Wikipedia's 60,000 article logo (24 April 2008)
Korean Wikipedia's 70,000 article logo (7 August 2008)
Korean Wikipedia's 80,000 article logo (20 November 2008)
Korean Wikipedia's 100,000 article logo (4 June 2009)
Korean Wikipedia's 150,000 article logo (15 December 2010)
Korean Wikipedia's 200,000 article logo (19 May 2012)
Korean Wikipedia's 250,000 article logo (3 October 2013)
Korean Wikipedia's 300,000 article logo (5 January 2015)
Korean Wikipedia's 400,000 article logo (22 October 2017)
Korean Wikipedia's 500,000 article logo (15 June 2020)
Korean Wikipedia's 600,000 article logo (16 August 2022)
^Naver, Wikipedia Search service launched – ETNews, 11 January 2008. On Naver's search results page, the search results from Wikipedia, which was categorized as "knowledge base", were listed prior to the results categorized as "web page".
