Korea Association of Wikimedia announced that Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia which anyone can participate in editing, celebrated its 15th anniversary on January 15. It hosted the 15th anniversary event at Event Hall in Seoul Citizens Hall on January 16.

To celebrate Wikipedia’s 15th anniversary, many events are held in domestic and foreign. Especially, the event held in Seoul was progressed in unconference way, a horizontal debating method, like Wikipedia’s event.

Wikipedia’s creator Jimmy Wales said “Wikipedia made us think again about what knowledge is. Wikipedia and Wikimedia project that anyone can edit them by reversing a peer review model are cooperative, dynamic and showing that everyone has to make together. The idea that seemed impossible for the last fifteen years worked even better than expected. Thanks to lots of volunteers throughout the world for making Wikipedia possible.”



On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was established by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger to provide a draft to Nupedia which is an encyclopedia edited by experts.

At the beginning, they had thought about earning profit by using advertisements, but Wikipedia became nonprofit project in 2002 due to disagreements of being commercial using by a Wikipedia community. In 2003, a nonprofit group, Wikimedia foundation had been established, and management of Wikipedia was transferred to Wikimedia foundation.

For the last fifteen years, Wikipedia explosively grew, and English Wikipedia reached five million topics on November 1, 2015. Meanwhile, Korean Wikipedia was established on October 11, 2002, and it currently contains about 330,000 topics.



Meanwhile, since December 2012, Acrofan has been participating in Wikipedia’s knowledge sharing project (https://goo.gl/cw6fUk). This project is a series of task opening and arranging information that groups or businesses own so that the public can freely use the information.

Acrofan is a site that had been opened as founder’s personal blog on October 1, 2006, functioned as me-media, and expanded to online newspaper since 2009. From the founder’s all-brain space of personal taste, it has been growing as a content bank for about 10 years aimed at all the areas using Korean. Based on this history, Acrofan will be reorganized into multilingual service configuration on this lunar New Year holidays.

In this event, Acrofan introduced its direction of reorganization to Korea Wikimedia Association officials, and gave notice about changes and reinforcement of ‘Wikipedia : knowledge sharing project/Acrofan’(https://goo.gl/2Dx8f2) caution. This issue will be sequentially applied after reorganization of Acrofan.



Copyright © acrofan All Right Reserved