Japanese Wikipedia
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Wikipedia Japanese edition is the Japanese edition of Wikipedia, a free, open content encyclopedia. It is the third largest edition trailing to the English and German editions. Started in September 2002, this edition has over 113,000 articles, as of April 2005.
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History
It seems that Wikipedia started being multilingual in May 2001. According to the announcement [1] (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Announcements_May_2001), May, about 12 non-English editions had been created, including a Japanese one. The original site address was http://ja.wikipedia.com and all pages were written in the Latin alphabet or romaji, as the software did not work with Japanese characters.
The first article was named "Nihongo No Funimekusu" (though incorrect, it was probably intended to mean onso taikei (phonemics)) and was written in entirely romaji. RoseParks, who was one of the initial members of Wikipedia, posted it in late March to early April. It seems the site had been in the test stage. Until late December in that year, there were only two pages.
Japanization
On September 1, 2002, the software hosting Wikipedia was upgraded to the so-called "Phase III", and the articles were moved from the old version to the new. From that point it becomes possible to trace the articles. As old articles show, there were articles posted by several non-native-Japanese speakers. The major coverage in that time includes Japanese culture, Language, Geography, and programming-related articles.
In the same month, the translation into Japanese of the Wikipedia software interface began. By the end of year, pages about how to edit or about the GNU Free Documentation License had been translated.
In mid-December, the number of registered users stood about 10; the number of articles also stood at around 10.
Coverage in Wired News Japanese edition
In January 31, 2003, a Japanese online magazine, Wired News Japanese edition covered Wikipedia. It seems that it was the first time that Wikipedia was mentioned in the Japanese media.
After that, the number of participants started to increase considerably and many pages about the Wikipedia project were translated or created.
There were a handful of articles about cartoonists, Japanese prefectures as well as stock trades.
1000 page milestone
On February 12, 2003, the Japanese edition of Wikipedia reached the 1000 pages milestone, two years after the English edition.
Slashdotted
Given that accomplishment, Slashdot Japan posted a story about Japanese Wikipedia. Several days after that, the number of participants doubled, attesting to the power of the Slashdot effect.
Because of this exposure, a variety of articles started to appear, among them Physics, Biology, Information technology, Literature, Music, Game, Manga, Celebrity.
Expansion
On July 15, 2003 the Japanese Wikipedia reached 10,000 articles, 4 months and 3 days after the 1,000-article milestone, beating the time it took the English Wikipedia to achieve the same feat. By early 2004 Japanese Wikipedia had reached 30,000 articles. The increase in both articles and contributors has been steady since then, and by late September it had reached 75,000 articles.
The major force behind the expansion does not appear to be the slashdot effect, but a number of links at Yahoo! Japan News. It is unknown exactly when Yahoo! started to put links to the edition in their articles, but as of August 2004 dozens of news articles posted on Yahoo! Japan contain links to the edition to explain terms in the articles. Lately, the developers of wikipedia have noticed that some spike in the server usage in the edition coincides with the occurances of news at Yahoo! Japan containing links to the edition.
Today, the vast majority of the contributors to the edition are native Japanese speakers, and a significant portion of articles are about topics related to Japan, particularly its culture and history.
Web Creation Award
On September 9, 2004 Guillaume Branchaud, known as Aoineko (see his user page in the Japanese and in the French wikipedias) in the Wikipedia community, was awarded as the founder of Japanese Wikipedia by Japan Advertisers Association.
See also
External link
- Japanese Wikipedia (http://ja.wikipedia.org/)ja:ウィキペディア日本語版