SEE ALSO THE WIKEPEDIA SITE OF THE TRUTH COMMISSION OF KOREA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission_(South_Korea)
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Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
The founder of Wikipedia said the South Korean government efforts to impose rules for Internet users will eventually fail.
Struggling to cope with the online criticism of its policies, the Lee Myung-bak government has been considering new laws to control Internet postings, which include plans to limit anonymity at commonly used Web sites and strengthening regulations for all sites publishing news.
``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.
``The most important solution to this kinds of bad behavior in the Internet may rest on the design of community spaces, whether the community has the ability to control what's going on. At Wikipedia, the community quickly identifies and blocks the people that misbehave and delete their negative contributes.
``I am not a big fan of limiting anonymity to have users behave themselves better, as there is very little evidence that actually works anywhere,'' he said.
Wales' distaste for Web surveillance is easy understandable when Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia written and edited by its users, is now widely considered the shining beacon of user-generated content, proof that sometimes an undefined group of amateur volunteers can produce better results than a unit of professionals.
Wikipedia, which has more than 2.6 million articles in English and over 10 million articles in 150 languages, is now one of the world's top 10 most popular Web sites.
Finding a balance between editorial judgment and censorship, thus finding the balance between openness and controlling the quality of content, is a question that faces Wales everyday.
Unlike its image of freewheeling openness, Wikipedia actually empowers a core community of editors and administrators who make decisions on whether to keep or delete articles according to the ``worthiness'' of the subject and credibility of the content.
``Deciding what to delete and what to keep is an ongoing process in the community that requires a lot of discussions and debate, but the most important factor in these judgments is verifiability,'' said Wales.
``The community puts a lot of effort in confirming whether the information is actually true, through third-party verification, consulting with reliable sources and many other factors,'' he said.
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.
