Four Wikipedians create a Wikipedia article on a soprano singer: report of the WikiGap in Kanagawa 2025

On March 2, 2025, in the brighting spring sunshine, I participated in WikiGap in Kanagawa 2025 held at the Kanagawa Prefectural Library. It was organized by the WikiGap Kanagawa Executive Committee. In the morning session, the research results of social activist Kikue Yamakawa were presented, as in the previous year, and there was also a presentation on developments after last year’s WikiGap. Next was an explanation of WikiGap, followed by an early lunch break.

I invited my old acquaintances Reiko Aoki, who published “Women and Libraries: Past, Present, and Future from a Gender Perspective” from Nichigai Associates Inc. last year, and Narumi.SBT, with whom I celebrated Wikipedia’s birthday in January, to a nearby restaurant. Although they had never met before, they found out that they had both tried to go to the same international conference on women’s rights, but it was canceled at the last minute in Pandemic, and they hit it off perfectly. It was an enjoyable lunch.

Back at 1:00 p.m., the afternoon session had begun with an explanation of editing Wikipedia. After an explanation of how to use the Prefectural Library, it was time for editing. I chose Hiroko Shiraishi, an opera singer from Kanagawa Prefecture, as my theme, and three more Wikipedians raised their hands, so the four of us had to work together. The staff of the Prefectural Library had collected newspaper and magazine articles on Hiroko Shiraishi in advance, so each of us took a little bit of it, compiled the parts that could be written on Wikipedia from our own computers into our own Wikipedia sandbox pages, and added the source of each article.

I copied Hiroko Shiraishi’s draft page prepared by the organizers into my own sandbox and prepared the infobox data. Ms. T, the school librarian, compiled Shiraishi’s CD data in detail and sent it to me via SNS, which I then poured into the sandbox page. I also received the source data and was able to enter 12 items in the discography section at once.

Narumi.SBT compiled the outline of Shiraishi’s life and sent it to me via SNS, also with the source. I poured the data into the sandbox, but an error message occurred in the footnotes. After consulting with the organizer, I found out that when data with sources created by different people are combined into one, the latter sometimes causes errors. So I corrected the data one by one in source edit mode and was able to clear the error.

Ms. M, a university librarian, summarized Shiraishi’s awards and other information and similarly I added to the sandbox. After finishing all the writing, we all checked the draft screen and pressed the publish button for the “Hiroko Shiraishi” article. Since Shiraishi was already listed in Wikidata, Ms. M tried to create a link between it and the Wikipedia article. Once that was done, the Wikipedia article automatically listed the source data for Shiraishi. In addition, when the CiNii authority ID that Ms. M found was entered in the Wikidata, it also appeared in Wikipedia. Through this series of work, Ms. M was able to open her eyes to Wikidata as well.

In less than two hours of work, we were able to create an article that exceeded our expectations, and all four of us were satisfied with each of our efforts. I, usually create articles alone, was more than happy to experience how working together can make an article even better. After ended the event, the article continued to grow up as not only the four of us but also other Wikipedians joined in and added to them.