Japanese Wikipedia
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
[edit] Facts
Started: May 2001, substantially Nov 2002
Areas of strength
- Transportation in Japan, such as train, bus, etc.
- Japanese TV show, Animation and Manga
- Japanese pop-stars and actors
- Geography of Japan and Germany.
Areas of weakness
- Things outside of Japan
- Culture as a whole
- Art, literature, philosophy
- Scientific articles including humanities and social science (jurisprudence, economics, etc.)
Who is the competition (print, online)?
- Heibonsha's World Encyclopædia (print)
- Microsoft Encarta (online)
[edit] Prominent milestones/events
- Press coverage in 2006, including Asahi shinbun (2006/07), NHK (2006/09)
- Web of the Year 2006 (Awarded by Yahoo! Japan, on December 2006)
- Rakuten Securities case
- 500,000th article in June 2008
What has its impact been?
- From 2006, increase of access; as of January 2007, approx. 9.8M people in Japan are estimated to visit the website in a month.
[edit] Features
What language features are challenging?
- no serious challenging; language was supported (UTF-8) from the beginning.
What would surprise the outside reader about the community?
- anonymity: close to 60% edits are submitted by unregistered users, while in the most of other Wikipedias the ratio remains under 20%. Registered users are rarely known with their real names.
- Lack of significant user groups: most of contributors have no continuous interaction between other users even on the wiki.
- Underdevelopped policies: Due to the low level communications, the discussion tend to get stuck. Also around policies. There are few "official policies" and many documents remain drafts (officially not adopted yet), including WP:BP, WP:LBP.
What are some unique practices/characteristics?
- Sysops have a dedicated mailing list (closed).
- Main contact is outside of wikimedia.org (explained due to technical reasons related to encoding).
- IRC are considered as an esoteric tool rather than common one.
- Uniformity of contributors: Most contributors are Japanese both in nationality and ethnicity, and living in Japan (so many articles may have systematic biases of Japanese residents).
- Influenced from other net community (en:2channel); strong inclination to anonimity, sense of civility etc.
- Low involvement of community to the governance, both local and global: (e.g. Sysops are around 50 per over 100K registered users, mailinglist wikija-l has low traffic).
- Talk pages about articles are frequently used, instead of of bold editing without discussion beforehand.
- TK
Who were the earliest participants, who started it?
- Tomos
- Suisui
- G
- Hoge
... [add other names]
Other historically prominent Wikipedians?
- Tietew
- Brevam
- Koba-chan
- KMT
... [add other names]
And other active prominent Wikipedians?
- Kanjy
- Ks aka 98
- 汲平
- co.kyoto
- ちゃたま
- Bellcricket
- Tantal
- Nekosuki600
- miya
... [add other names]
Emerging Wikipedians?
- 海獺
... [add other names]
Extraordinary small-shot Wikipedians?
... [add other names]
