Wikipedia Accessible on Mobile Phones
By Kim Tae-gyu
Staff Reporter
The Korean-language content of Wikipedia, a much-visited online encyclopedia, will be accessible on cellular phones starting today for more than 22 million handset users.
SK Telecom, the nation's biggest wireless operator, said Thursday that its customers can look up anything on Wikipedia via its mobile Internet services.
``Tens of thousands of pieces of information stored in the database will be available to people on the road from Wikipedia's Korean version,'' SK Telecom official Yang Yoon-seon said.
``We will begin with text-only files but images will be added in the near future. Plus, we are thinking of connecting to the English-edition too,'' said Yang.
The content will be updated every week for the time being but the indexing interval will be monitored on a daily basis when the services take off in a full-fledged manner.
Included in other envisioned applications is enabling people to edit the data with cell phones.
Those who want to use the handset-based Wikipedia services need to log on to the wireless Internet that charges users in accordance with delivered data packets, typically around 100 to 150 won a minute.
When they sign up for a flat-rate scheme for data, the offerings will not generate additional costs.
Wikipedia the Web-enabled encyclopedia that can be written or edited by anybody, authorized by a screening group, without restriction, has emerged as a serious competitor of the time-honored Encyclopedia Britannica.
It is interesting for SK Telecom to bring Wikipedia to cell phones because the Seoul-headquartered company did the same with the Encyclopedia Britannica in April.
``Today, we deal with thousands of daily queries for Britannica and will check those for Wikpedia. We think the comparison will reveal interesting results,'' Yang said.
The rivalry between Britannica, first published around 1770, and Wikipedia, which came out in 2001 with the take-up of the Internet across the world, seems improbable.
In particular, concerns have arisen that Wikipedia entries might not be reliable since unpaid amateur writers can make errors or unscrupulous contributors may intentionally mess things up.
In late 2005, however, the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, confirmed the credibility of Wikipedia by finding that the site comes just as close to Britannica in terms of accuracy in science entries.
Among sections covering a broad swath of the scientific spectrum in the two encyclopedias, Nature reviewers conducted a side-by-side comparison and detected just four serious errors from each source.