week2: thoughts on Wikipedia - ljhwa(이진화)

Summary

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia used all over the world. It can be modified and updated by anyone, and it operates for non-profit purposes.


Interesting points

- why is Wikipedia less popular in South Korea than in most other developed countries?

 First, a key reason is that South Korea primarily uses different portal sites. While many other countries rely on Google as their default search engine, South Korea predominantly uses its own portal site, "Naver." When users search for information, Naver prioritizes Korean platforms like "Namuwiki" over foreign sites such as Wikipedia. Since Namuwiki provides a comparable amount of information within South Korea, it can be inferred that Wikipedia’s influence is relatively weaker.

 Second, there is a significant difference in the amount of available content. Wikipedia’s main page displays the number of articles for each language. While Wikipedia offers content in many languages, English Wikipedia has over 6,964,000 articles, whereas Korean Wikipedia has only about 699,000. This substantial gap in content volume directly affects user engagement, as a smaller number of articles makes Wikipedia less useful for Korean users.

Due to these factors, Wikipedia’s influence in South Korea appears to be weaker than in other developed countries.


Discussion

Wikipedia has the advantage that everyone can edit, but this makes me doubt public confidence. Is there a way for Wikipedia to have more public confidence?

Comments

  1. Yeonseo KooMarch 15, 2025 at 11:52 PM

    Certainly domestic websites seem to dominate in South Korea. (Naver, Namuwiki, KakaoTalk etc) Is this because Korea is one of the technology powerhouses? Or should we understand this as another example of Galapagos Syndrome? I have used both Wikipedia and Namuwiki. At least in my experience, Namuwiki is accepted to have less public trust than Wikipedia. The buzzword among young Koreans, "Turn off the Namuwiki" (aka 나무위키 꺼라) explains this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. pineappleQMarch 16, 2025 at 4:37 AM

    Perhaps Wikipedia could do more to control the source of information, such as adding citations to articles that require a secondary screening to avoid false information and to havemore public confidence.

    ReplyDelete

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