Namuwiki

Namuwiki is a Korean language wiki. It was launched on 17 April 2015, is powered by the proprietary wiki software The Seed, and is currently based in Paraguay. According to Similarweb, it is the seventh most visited website in South Korea.

The material found on it is written in a personal/subjective style that was characteristic of the wiki from which it was forked, the Rigveda Wiki. It has much more lax guidelines than Wikipedia, does not necessarily require references or sources, and has been criticized as being inaccurate and biased.

As of December 2022, Namuwiki contained approximately 4,760,171 main articles (including redirects), compared to pages (including redirects) on the Korean Wikipedia as of July.

History
In April 2015, one of the largest Otaku subculture wikis in Korea, Rigveda Wiki, suffered a massive community dispute when the site owner, Cheongdong, was discovered to have secretly changed the user agreement to privatize the wiki for his personal profit. Users vandalized articles in protest, forcing the closure of the servers. In response, Namuwiki was created as a fork by a user named Namu on 17 April. The article count of Namuwiki surpassed that of Rigveda Wiki by 25 April, and surpassed Rigveda Wiki's original article count before its vandalism on 12 May. Namuwiki emerged as one of the biggest wikis forked from the Rigveda Wiki, and soon became its de facto replacement.

In May 2016, Namu transferred Namuwiki's server management rights to a new owner, UmanLe S.R.L., a company based in Asunción, Paraguay.

In August 2016, one Namuwiki user created an article about "equalism". The article falsely claimed that a supposed new ideology, "equalism", has appeared in the West, and made multiple remarks against feminist ideologies. As South Korea was seeing heated online debates about radical feminist website Megalia during this time, the article quickly gained a lot of attraction and contributions. Although most of the assertions and reference included in the article were false or fabricated, contents of it were widely spread over Korean society, resulting in false articles about the concept of equalism. The false article existed for longer than 6 months, until a Feminist wiki named Femiwiki brought forward specific and definite arguments on 24 January 2017. Soon, it was proved that most of the claims were false, and the original idea of equalism was mostly a fabrication.

In September 2018, the site began displaying advertisements on the top banner of its pages, ostensibly to help fund its server rental fees.

Articles
Like its predecessor Rigveda Wiki, Namuwiki's articles are lightly worded and humorous, often containing jokes or references to subculture knowledge from various areas, including movies, games, and online memes. It has a unique form of narrative through the use of strikethroughs, which are primarily applied to sentences that are written as part of a tongue-in-cheek joke. Bolding is used liberally, often to highlight an important phrase. Although the primary focus of articles is placed on popular subcultures (the original targeted material of Rigveda Wiki) like video games, anime, and movies, there are also many articles written on the fields of science, history, scholarship, and current events. However, less emphasis is placed on creating verifiable information; Namuwiki acknowledges on its behalf that its comparatively lax editing policies can cause material to be incorrect, biased, or defamatory, especially given its smaller number of contributors. As a result, the articles on Namuwiki are considered to be less scholarly than the likes of the Korean Wikipedia. The tone of Namuwiki is also much lighter, as it allows jokes and puns.

Content of Namuwiki is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Korea (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license).

As of December 2022, Namuwiki contained approximately 4,760,171 main articles (including redirects) and over 3,067,897 files. For comparison, the Korean Wikipedia has pages (including redirects) as of July.

Press coverage
In March 2017, an article published by the Korean news outlet MK News detailed Namuwiki and the "humorous" writing style of its articles. The article attributed Namuwiki's growth to its accessibility and humor. However, this and its ease of editing also leads to articles with biased and unfounded opinions.

In November 2018, Namuwiki was mentioned by Korean news outlet representative Junghwan Lee as a positive example for news outlets to follow in the context of fake news, explaining that information contributed online from repeated discussion, deletion, and adjustments ultimately creates truthful information.

On 9 January 2019, Korean politician Cho Hae-joo formally announced that he had deleted material written on his Namuwiki page, as it contained "false elements," which resulted in political backlash.

Administration
Umanle S.R.L.'s base of operation in Asunción, Paraguay has led to concerns over the legal venues available for Korean citizens to seek correction of information they consider harmful, given the bureaucratic difficulties in handling legal matters with a foreign entity under foreign law. Various hypotheses have arisen to speculate the motivation behind the wiki's transfer, the most prominent of which characterizes the move as an attempt to avoid sensitive South Korean internet laws.

Not much information has been revealed about Umanle S.R.L., its employees, or its owner(s). Data from Paraguay's Ministry of Finance confirms its existence. Some users raised concerns that Namuwiki may be operating under a ghost company.

Kim Nak-Ho (김낙호), a professor of journalism opined that relying on opaque administration may be problematic for online communities. He further added that collaborative encyclopedia projects should be owned by a formal non-profit with transparent funding.

Accuracy and neutrality
Namuwiki does not necessarily require sources, nor does it have strict restrictions on contributions containing inaccurate information or subjective perspectives; it is only "recommended" to leave citations in cases of direct quotes. Due to no requirements for fact-checking, Namuwiki has been criticized for lack of accuracy and reliability. The phrase "turn off Namuwiki" has become a running joke in many Korean Internet communities, targeting its users who act knowledgeable about certain topics without doing in-depth and credible research outside of Namuwiki.