SK Telecom, the nation's biggest wireless operator, said Thursday that its customers can look up anything on Wikipedia via its mobile Internet services. ens 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.
e 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 offering will not generate additional costs.
Wikipedia, the Web-enabled encyclopedia that can be written or edited by anybody without restriction and edited by a screening group, 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.
oday 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 takeoff 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 an average of four serious errors from each source, compared to an average of three in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
