Wikipedia founder on Korean Internet regulation plans
2008/11/09 11:35Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia was recently in Seoul to speak at the International Conference on Global Entrepreneurship and spoke out about plans from the Korean government to increase Internet regulation:
``Overkill,'' says Jimmy Wales, the founder of the online encyclopedia, referring to a legislative effort by the government.
``This is certainly a dangerous path to go down,'' Wales told The Korea Times on the sidelines of a Web industry conference in southern Seoul Tuesday.
``The governments that are given the power to block things usually tend to block things, including information that originally wasn't intended to be blocked from access,'' said Wales.
He made similar comments in a short interview with The Hankyoreh.
Wales also was in Korea to promote Wikipedia which included signing a deal with Daum to help increase Wikipedia’s presence in Korea:
Despite the country's high broadband Internet penetration rate, Wikipedia's Korean language page has been struggling to gain acceptance, with just 700,000 articles and around 500 regular contributors.
Daum, the country's No. 2 Internet portal, signed a deal to provide their encyclopedic content to Wikipedia's Korean page and provide them in its search results, which are expected to increase the number of articles to around 180,000.
The first statistic in the Korea Times quote is incorrect, the Korean version of Wikipedia currently has 78,424 articles.
Here’s a video (in Korean) showing how Daum incorporates Wikipedia into their site:
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