Booth “Wikipedia Exhibition” at Library Fair 2024

by , Member of The Wikimedian Society of Tokyo and edit Tango. I have written over 1000 articles and have written approximately 30 Good Articles for the Japanese Wikipedia. I have been participating in Wikimedia outreach activities since 2014. I also provides explanations and editing support at Wikipedia-related events. I was featured as a Wikipedian in the 2022 Japanese book "Librarian Directory" (Seikyusha).
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From November 5th to November 7th, 2024, The Library Fair 2024 was held in Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, and the booth “Wikipedia Exhibition” was exhibited.

What is the Library Fair?

The Library Fair is an exhibition for the library industry held every autumn. It takes place in the Pacifico Yokohama hall, and attracts approximately 10,000 visitors per day, for a total of 30,000 visitors over the three days.

Exhibitors include companies that undertake library management services, companies that sell library fixtures, publishers, bookstores, and university research groups. Visitors include librarians from public and school libraries, employees of various library-related companies, and students studying library and information science.

What is the “Wikipedia Exhibition”?

In order to spread awareness of the compatibility between libraries and Wikipedia among participants of the Library Fair, the “Wikipedia Exhibition” booth has been exhibited since 2022, led by Soseki-no-Neko. The exhibition of this booth is financially subsidized by the Wikimedia Foundation.

In addition to exhibiting a booth over the three days of the Library Fair, we also exhibited posters in the poster session. In the morning of November 6th, Yuriko Kadokura, author of the book “The 70-Year-Old Wikipedian,” gave a presentation titled “The Current State of the Wikimedia Movement” at the forum venue.

About 10 staff members were involved in managing the booth and broadcasting the forum via Zoom. The staff explained the basic structure of Wikipedia and how to edit to visitors, introduced them to Wikipedia Towns being held all over Japan, and even let them try editing Wikipedia.

Wikipedia exhibition booth

Many of the people who visited the booth happened to find the Wikipedia exhibition booth at the Library Fair. Many people probably wondered, “Why is there a Wikipedia booth at a library exhibition?”

Wikipedia has a rule that “writing must be based on sources.” From Wikipedia’s perspective, when editing, we use library documents, and from the library’s perspective, we use documents that they own.

Because of this close relationship between libraries and Wikipedia, citizen-participation workshops called “Wikipedia Town” are held all over Japan. Wikipedia Town typically involve editing local Wikipedia articles using materials from public libraries, but there are also edit-athons that specialize in subjects such as literature or art, or use materials from specialized libraries.

A variety of people visited our booth at the Wikipedia exhibition. Many of them worked in public or school libraries, but we also had people who worked at the National Diet Library, people from an encyclopedia publishing company, and people who teach library and information studies at universities.

When I talked to people who visited our booth, I got the sense that Wikipedia itself is well-known, but most people still don’t know that Wikipedia can be used in more ways, so I think it was worth it to have a booth.

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