I went to Kyoto Research Park on July 27, 2024, because VZP10224 of the Wikimedians of Japan User Group was going to give a talk on Wikidata. This Open-Source Conference has been held since 2004 in various locations throughout Japan, including Nagoya in May, and scheduled for Tokyo and Hiroshima in September, and Nagaoka and Tokyo in October. The organizer’s website says it is “an event that conveys the current state of open source.
The Kyoto Research Park Exhibition Hall, the venue of the event, was filled with attendees spreading out their respective materials on open source at their desks from morning. Along with the big players like Sakura Internet, there were also booths of small groups and individuals, where I could see the products of various themes such as blockchain, Linux, OpenAI, and so on. The user group booth was also visited by a variety of visitors, including a young man from Norway who eagerly asked about Wikidata and attended the afternoon session. The next booth was OpenStreetMap (OSM), so they taught me how to link an OSM map to a Wikipedia article I had created.
The user group held a session titled “First Steps to Wikidata Editing” along with a booth exhibit, and as in Nagoya, VZP10224 gave a presentation. He elaborated on what Wikidata is in relation to the Wikimedia movement and mentioned that the purpose of the movement is “free sharing of knowledge” and the “Universal Code of Conduct” that supports it. He then showed the actual editing on the Wikidata screen, and presented several examples of Mix’n’mach, which imports other datasets into Wikidata, and the Wikidata Graph Builder to display the contents of wikidata in graph form. I was struck again by the potential of the diverse world of Wikidata in both input and output scenarios.
In the evening, a lightning talk was held, in which 10 participants, including young people and veterans, gave talks that were rich in individuality. The reception, which was held in a different room, was very lively, and we were able to have fruitful conversations with people we had never met before. I was fortunate to be present as the wisdom of open data was passed on to the younger generation, and I was impressed once again by the energy that such face-to-face events generate. The Wikipedia-related meetings I have attended in the past were mostly attended by library staff, but there was a completely different atmosphere, and I greatly enjoyed the possibilities and expansiveness of open source.
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