People
Information without borders
First HK administrator of Chinese Wikipedia tells Melody Chu his role in pitching in with the spread of information and knowledge online.
Larry Lo Wing-kei spends several hours everyday surfing the internet. But unlike many other young people who just chat with friends and search for information on the net, the 21-year-old fresh graduate writes and edits articles as a ˇ§Wikipedianˇ¨ to provide information about different areas of knowledge for all and for free online.
Mr Lo is the first Hong Kong administrator as well as one of the first five people worldwide overseeing Wikipediaˇ¦s Chinese-language edition.
ˇ§Everybody is welcome to use the information without having to pay any money,ˇ¨ said Mr Lo, who finds Wikipedia a meaningful project. He said he shared the online encyclopaediaˇ¦s idea of spreading knowledge to people around the world for free.
Knowledge should not be controlled by only a small group of people or be paid for. The barriers to obtaining information and knowledge have to be brought down, the chemistry graduate from the Chinese University of Hong Kong said.
He explained that the objective of Wikipedia was to print all its information on paper and to distribute them for free. For example, it can publish books and bring them to remote regions so that poor children there can learn.
Mr Lo joined the Wikipedia project in 2002 when he was in form six.
The word ˇ§Wikipediaˇ¨ is a combination of ˇ§wikiˇ¨ and ˇ§encyclopaediaˇ¨. ˇ§Wikiˇ¨ is a type of website that allowsvisitors to edit its content, and that is a special feature of Wikipedia. The non-profit making Web-based free content encyclopaedia was set up by American Jimmy Wales in 2001. So far, it has about 250 language editions, containing more than five million articles in total.
Anyone who writes and edits articles of the site is called a ˇ§Wikipedianˇ¨. Up to October, some 2.6 million people have become Wikipedians. But Wikipedians are volunteers and receive no pay.
Mr Lo first encountered the free information site when he was doing research, and the link to Wikipedia was the first result shown. In Wikipedia, he found not only the information he needed, but also an editing tool.
The editing tool aroused his interest. ˇ§I was thinking what information about Hong Kong could be added to the site. The first thing that came to my mind was the Tsing Ma Bridge,ˇ¨ he said.
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