OpenTory (오픈토리)

» see opentory.joins.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 3 November 2008 JoongAng Ilbo announced that it was opening an encyclopedia. The notice is still on the newspaper's website today, which is more than can be said for the encyclopedia. It described a wiki-based open knowledge store built in the spirit of participation and sharing, said the thing already held more than 120,000 headwords, and ended by hoping that OpenTory would grow into a national knowledge resource. The philosophy it quoted was that a hundred ordinary people are better than one clever one.

The 120,000 headwords were the newspaper's own. JoongAng loaded in its multimedia encyclopedia Eureka as the base. On top of that went its specialist volumes on health, on North Korea and on the environment, plus material pulled from Bunsudae, the column that has run in the paper since its first issue. The name was a pun the company explained itself, open plus the tory that ends history and factory, which it glossed as a factory of knowledge.

A reader on the Korean Wikipedia asked the obvious question about the launch: so what was it until now? The site had been serving pages publicly since at least 7 September 2008, when a capture shows it advertising 125,117 headwords. Its own encyclopedia entry had been created a month before the launch announcement. It was announced as a beta, and the logo still carried a BETA badge on the day it died, two years and nine months later.

~ the case file ~

~ the locked front door ~

You could not edit OpenTory without logging in. There was no anonymous editing at all, which was the opposite of the Korean Wikipedia's policy and was defended at the time on the grounds that it kept the vandals out. It did. It also kept everybody else out. On 11 October 2010 the site's own statistics page reported 135,205 content articles, 152,151 pages in total, 260,563 edits, 16,423 uploaded images, 1,695 registered users and eleven administrators.

Put the edit count next to the user count and the whole thing resolves. That is about 1.7 edits per page, against roughly fourteen and a half on the Korean Wikipedia, which had a hundred and thirty thousand accounts to OpenTory's seventeen hundred. The article on Roh Moo-hyun had 110 edits and around eighty of them came from administrators. By article count it was still the third largest wiki in the Korean language: on 7 August 2011 Wiktionary held 202,733 words and Wikipedia 169,742 articles, both of them ahead of a number OpenTory had last moved the previous year. It had eighty percent of Wikipedia's articles and about one and a half percent of its editors. It was a corpus wearing a wiki.

~ the footer and the terms ~

Article 12 of the terms of service said that every document followed the GNU Free Documentation License, and linked to version 1.2 at gnu.org. The footer under every page said 2009 www.opentory.com all Rights Reserved. Both statements sat on the same screen for the whole of the site's life.

People noticed immediately. In November 2008 a Korean Wikipedian who had spent some time hunting for the license grant wrote that neither of the two copyright notices could be trusted, that the people running the site did not appear to understand what the GFDL was, and that whoever had final say did not seem to know that the terms licensed every document under it. Staff had already conceded part of the point in a phone call that August: asked whether the 120,000 seeded headwords were really GFDL, OpenTory answered that this was not yet clear, and that it would need agreement with JoongAng Ilbo, which had supplied the material, before you could say the switch was complete. In the same conversation they mentioned that the idea for the whole project had come from Lee O-young, the newspaper's advisor and the country's first culture minister.

There was also an awkward incident in which an administrator account copied the Korean Wikipedia's entire article on the Kangxi Emperor across. A staff member accepted that this was wrong. When the Wikipedian went back to look, that stretch of the page history was no longer there.

~ the mirror nobody built ~

The closing notice went up as a popup. The cookie that stopped it showing twice is named for 25 July 2011, which is when readers started seeing it, and it pointed at a page called goodbye.html that the Internet Archive never captured even once. The date it gave was 24 August. The site made it: the last article edit recorded in its own feed is timestamped 11:55 on 23 August, and the last capture of anything on the host is from the small hours of the twenty-fourth.

On the Korean Wikipedia's village pump, somebody worked out within a day that the content was GFDL and therefore anyone was free to back it up and run a mirror. Another user said they would try if they knew how. A third offered to pay the server hosting costs out of pocket. Then a fourth pointed at the footer and said that with the copyright position in that state, nobody could safely invest in a mirror. The thread stops there. No mirror was ever built and no dump was ever uploaded to the Internet Archive. A hundred and thirty-five thousand articles that any person on earth was legally entitled to copy went off the internet because nobody could be sure of it.

What is left is 1,625 article titles that the Wayback Machine happened to crawl, which is a bit over one percent. JoongAng said nothing about why it stopped, then kept the hostname alive for more than a decade pointing every dead article at the newspaper's front page, dragging the old query strings along in the redirect. The hostname is gone now and opentory.com is parked on a for-sale page. The last thing worth recording is from the homepage, which carried the line, right to the end, that OpenTory was optimized for Internet Explorer 7.

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