Holding Japan Wikimedia Conference 2025

The Wikimeidans of Japan User Group held the Japan Wikimedia Conference 2025 in conjunction with the Open Source Conference 2025 Tokyo/Spring, held at Komazawa University on February 22, 2025.

Looking back, this project started when I made a comment at a Wikimania presentation held at the Open Source Conference (OSC) in Tokyo the previous fall: “I want to hold an event with our own group.” And Miyahara, the organizer of OSC, responded to that comment.

Although Wikimedia conferences have been held in Japan in the past (in 2009, 2010, and 2021; if anyone knows of any others, please let us know), the focus of the discussion has inevitably been on Wikipedia and its content, and it seems that there have been almost no opportunities to present the Wikimedia movement or projects other than Wikipedia in Japan.

On the other hand, as someone who had suddenly jumped into the middle of the Wikimedia movement, Wikimania, at the ESEAP Conference in 2024, I felt that I had to create an opportunity to spread the word in Japan in some way.

So I immediately had various discussions with Mr. Miyahara, the organizer of OSC, and somehow managed to secure three seminar slots in the morning of the second day.

From there, we considered what we could fit into the session content and decided to hold the following four sessions.
・About Wikipedia（Saebo’s session published on Wikimania）
・About Wikidata（Wikimedia Deutschland　Alan’s session）
・Use Wikimedia Commons data for other projects（OpenStreetMap Sakanoshita’s session）
・About Wikimedia movement（Ivonne’s session）

Once the session slots were decided, we had to ask the people who would be appearing to record the videos (Saebo-san, Alan-san), and then ask someone to add subtitles after receiving the videos, and we continued to complete tasks in between our respective jobs. Considering that we would have to reserve the venue ourselves, we are extremely grateful to the OSC secretariat, who took on all the responsibility of arranging the venue.

Although the event was only announced a week before, we had to use the site notice function of the Japanese Wikipedia to direct people to the event information page, and then direct them from there to the OSC registration page… and so on and so forth, we arrived at the day feeling anxious about how much we would be able to do.

In the end, there were around 20 people in attendance from the start at 10:00 until the end at 12:45, so I’m feeling a bit proud that it was a moderate success.

Below are links to services that use Wikidata data, which Alan mentioned in his introduction to Wikidata.

Wikiflix
https://wikiflix.toolforge.org/#/

KDE Itinerary
https://apps.kde.org/itinerary/

Notable People
https://tjukanovt.github.io/notable-people

Govdirectory
https://www.govdirectory.org/

Scribe
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Scribe

The Surrounding Ocean
https://vrandezo.github.io/TheSurroundingOcean/

None of these sites have a fully developed Japanese environment yet, but please feel free to visit them.

The community request list mentioned in Ivonne’s session is here. If you have any requests related to Wikimedia projects, please submit them here.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist/ja

Finally, I (VZP10224) reported on the user group’s external activities, starting with an online survey to be conducted in 2023, and the direction of future activities, and the conference came to a close.

After the conference program ended, Wikimedia Project flyers were used to explain the project to visitors at the exhibition booth.

Finally, the reason why we, the Wikimedians of Japan User Group, have been able to continue our activities in this way is largely due to the existence of the OSC platform, which holds regular meetings all over the country. After the panic caused by the infectious disease, the means by which IT engineers gather information and announce various events have shifted from face-to-face to online, and it seems that things like human interaction and unexpected encounters are being neglected these days. However hard we try, it is ultimately humans who enrich Wikimedia’s content, so we want to value offline spaces. I believe that opportunities for offline interaction like OSC are valuable, especially in the OSS field, where there is a lot of individual activity that is not commercially viable, and I personally hope to contribute to ensuring that opportunities like OSC continue for as long as possible.

Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to everyone at Komazawa University for providing us with the OSC venue. Thank you very much.