Trying to squeeze water from a stone.

I’ve done a lot of thinking, and have written a number of draft posts on this topic, and I’m curious whether a centralized information source like the Galbijim Wiki is useful to the foreign community. I’ve spent countless hours writing content for it over the past 14 months, but the latest shutdown—as well as a few other developments—has made me question its purpose. I’ve always supported the idea of an open encyclopedia to collect information spread out over a number of pages and forums, and to synthesize information heretofore unavailable in English. A big complaint I’ve always had is that foreigners here generally have no interest in pooling their knowledge into a single source, but would rather blog and photograph on their own, and ask and answer the same redundant questions over and over on the forums.

But I realize that complaint is a little misguided. Foreigners do share their knowledge. Korea groups are all over Facebook.com, and there are lots of Korea-related message boards. And foreigners around here do make the occassional well-informed blog entry on a particular mountain, temple, beach, or other point of interest.

While they share knowledge they, don't, however, pool it. Ownership of ideas is very important, which explains the popularity of blogging, and which is why people refer to the Galbijim Suncheon page not as the Suncheon page but rather Brian's Suncheon page. And, as I see it, foreigners don’t value facts as much as they value impressions. That is, a Galbijim article might lay out population figures, might list restaurants and bars, might give directions to parks and movie theaters. But foreigners aren’t interested in what or where things are, but rather how things are, and opinions are invariably bound to their owners. While I have been bemoaning the lack of interest in Galbijim or Waygook.org (message board for Jeollanam-do teachers), I haven’t been paying enough attention to blogger or facebook, where hundreds of foreigners in South Jeolla are participating). The problem for Galbijim, then, is that its content is written by only a handful of faithful contributors, and the Jeolla content is generally written entirely by me. The nature of an encyclopedia means that I can give you all the facts you’ll need, but I can’t (explicitly) give you my impression. When an encyclopedia entry is written by a single person, there’s no reason to hold it in higher regard than a blog entry, and when an encyclopedia entry is written by a single person, there’s no reason to think it any different than a blog entry.

I had always hoped more people would get involved with the wiki. I’ve written elsewhere that, since a lot of the Jeollanam-do placements are among the first foreigners in their areas, who better than them to profile their part of the country? But the interest just isn’t there. I never understood why people would collaborate on a message board, and would comment on one another’s blog, and would join thirty different facebook groups, but wouldn’t work on a wiki page. I think the big reason is that the wiki looks more like a personal project than an open encyclopedia. They’re partly right, and if you search through the “recent changes” you won’t find many made by people other than the administrators and Bundanggumin, the resident Bundang . . . resident. Encyclopedia entries don’t have the personal touch people like, and even after all the work we put in, there are still people on Dave’s asking “What’s Suncheon like?”

When the wiki came back a few days ago from a three-week shutdown, it lost 1,700 articles, about 28% of the Jeollanam-do pages, and several dozen photos taken by me. I haven’t decided whether it’s worth it to rewrite or retake them. For Suncheon-related material alone there's Galbijim, there's "Suncheon Crowd," there's "Suncheon City ESL Teachers," there's "Suncheon Drinking Club," and there's Waygook.org, to say nothing of Dave's ESL Cafe, or blogs, or the websites and mailing lists for nearby cities and towns. Of that list, Galbijim is probably the sixth most popular--there are probably some blogs that get more traffic than the Galbijim Suncheon page--and that's before 75% of the content was wiped out. I’ve, unfortunatley, spent a lot of the past year trying to create a foreign community in Jeollanam-do. Create a community, in the active voice, through Galbijim or through Waygook.org, where I’m also a moderator, rather than letting a community be created. Communities must form organically, and the trend is currently blogger and facebook, where impressions and opinions are encouraged, and where the public and private coexist.

Well, the latest Galbijim implosion reminds us that information isn’t immutable and eternal, but exists only when there are people to give it. Bonghwasan is still there, even if the page isn’t, and is ready to be rediscovered and rewritten countless times by countless people. My page on that mountain was a combination of other pages, filtered through my personal judgement and preference. An encyclopedia pretends to authority, but its authority is, in turn, dependent on its contributors and the faith of its readers. I don’t know if encyclopedia can thrive when it depends so completely on a single judgement or a single set of preferences. When I started putting together content for Galbijim over a year ago, I set out to eliminate some of the redundancy found on forums and blogs, and to synthesize the information spread far and wide into one source. I wonder now if people even perceive the redundancy. I think they prefer it, and that makes me question whether there is such a thing as a one-stop Korea site.