Japanese Wikipedia

The is the Japanese-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-source online encyclopedia. Started on 11 May 2001, the edition attained the 200,000 article mark in April 2006 and the 500,000 article mark in June 2008. As of , it has over articles with active contributors, ranking fourth behind the English, French and German editions.

As of June 2020, it is the world's most visited language Wikipedia after the English Wikipedia.

History

In March 2001, three non-English editions of Wikipedia were created, namely, the German, Catalan and Japanese Wikipedias. The original site address of the Japanese Wikipedia wa
http://nihongo.wikipedia.com
and all pages were written in the Latin alphabet or romaji, as the software did not work with Japanese characters at the time. The home page also showed an early attempt at creating a vertical text.

The first article was named "Nihongo no Funimekusu" (meaning "Phonemics of the Japanese language"). Until late December in that year, there were only two articles.

Awards

In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded the "2004 Web Creation Award Web-Person Special Prize" from the Japan Advertisers Association. This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Web in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.

Characteristics

The Japanese Wikipedia is different from the English Wikipedia in a number of ways.

Editing

*An edit is kept only if it is legal under both Japanese and United States laws, to account for the fact that the vast majority of contributors live in Japan. This has two major consequences:
**The fair use provisions of US law are not considered to be applicable. Articles and media files which do not have a GFDL-compatible license are prohibited, even if they would be legal under the "fair use" doctrine in the US.
**Materials considered illegal cannot be kept in the archive, even reverted by oneself but caught in history archive. If an illegal edit is inserted between valid versions, an admin may make specific revisions inaccessible from the history.
*Quotation is discouraged. There is controversy over the GFDL compatibility of quotations. Articles that contain quotations will be deleted unless they meet all the following legal requirements:
*#The source is clearly referred to.
*#The quotation is necessary.
*#The quoting and quoted works can respectively be regarded as the principal and subordinate both in quantity and quality.
*#The quoting and quoted works are clearly distinguishable.
*Cut-and-paste moves within Wikipedias, including merging, splitting, and translation from another language are not allowed unless the original article source and date is explicitly referred to in the edit summary, because such moves are considered to be GFDL violations. Articles created in such a manner will be deleted. A comparable policy is in place on the English Wikipedia, but it is only casually enforced.

*Wikipedians in Japanese Wikipedia generally do not create independent lists of volumes of manga, or episodes of anime, however there are exceptions, e.g. :ja:Q.E.D. 証明終了のエピソード一覧 and :ja:ONE PIECE (アニメ) のエピソード一覧. Articles about manga works usually do not contain lists of chapters. Also lists of episodes of anime embedded in related articles and independent lists of episodes of anime do not contain plot synopsis.

Community

*IP users' contributions are high compared to other major language versions of Wikipedia (see graph).
*The Japanese Wikipedia has the lowest number of administrators per active users (only %).
*Edit wars are strongly frowned upon. Articles may be protected as a result of an edit war with as little as three or four edits. Protected pages will not be unprotected unless someone explicitly requests it. Perhaps because of this, the Japanese Wikipedia had the second-highest number of articles protected for over two weeks, after the German Wikipedia. In May 2008, 0.0906% of articles were fully protected (only editable by admins), which was by far the highest percentage among the ten largest Wikipedias. Articles on sensitive topics, such as Japanese war crimes and current territorial disputes, are almost always under lengthy protection.
*On April 18, 2010, there was a proposal to create a new namespace specifically for WikiProjects to shorten the name of a WikiProject. This proposal finally passed and a new namespace named "プロジェクト:" (Project:) was created for WikiProjects on September 20 the same year (UTC).
*The edition stresses the fact that it is not a news bulletin, and discourages edits on current events.
*In keeping with the strong aversion to edit wars, the administrators react negatively to cases where many minor edits are made to a single article in a short period of time.
*The Japanese Wikipedia is Japan-centered, due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of users are Japanese people, nearly all living in Japan. When referring to places outside Japan they are often called "overseas", and references to Japanese perspective on articles are common. They are trying to discourage this tendency.

Policies

*Articles will be deleted if they contain the names of private citizens, unless they are public figures (under section B-2 of Japanese deletion policy). For example, an article about Shosei Koda, a Japanese citizen kidnapped in Iraq, does not refer to him by name, but former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's name may be mentioned due to his public position. Convicted criminals and their victims are considered private citizens, even if the case was extensively covered in Japanese media, and their names may not be published until their death.
* The Japanese edition of the English policy Ignore All Rules (directly linked to one of Five Pillars) is neither a policy nor a guideline.
* The Japanese edition of the English Wikipedia how-to guide How to write a plot summary is a formal guideline.
* The Japanese edition of the English Wikipedia page Handling trivia (which is an explanatory supplement to the Manual of Style guideline on trivia sections) is a formal guideline as well.
* The Japanese edition of the English banning policy is not a policy, for lack of the Arbitration Committee.
* Toukou Burokku Irai (Blocking requests), which has no corresponding rules in English Wikipedia, is frequently used. And often well-known users who have been active for a long time are blocked indefinitely. The blocked user may appeal for lifting the block, as in the case of blocking in English Wikipedia.
*There is no local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in Japan.

Culture

Andrew Lih

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