A 70-year-old Wikipedian (6) Meet various Wikipedians

This is an English translation of my book entitled “A 70-year-old Wikipedian talks about the charm of libraries.” Chapter 1, The Road to Wikipedia. Previously, click here.

Meet various Wikipedians (Chapter 1-6)

Wikipedia writing had not progressed much since 2016, but at the 2018 Library Fair in Yokohama, I found the “Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap Editing in Practice” event hosted by OpenGLAM JAPAN, applied for it, and went to the venue, Pacifico Yokohama, on October 31, 2018. I was already familiar with editing Wikipedia to some extent, but this was my first experience with OpenStreetMap, where people create open data maps together, and it was quite interesting. I guess this is another form of collective knowledge. After the explanation, Wikipedian Sakaori gave us some tips on how to edit Wikipedia during the practical training. I was glad that he was so attentive to beginners’ questions.

While strolling around the venue after the event, I bumped into Kazue Takano. I first met Ms. Takano at the Library Camp planned by Makoto Okamoto of ARG (now arg). When I heard from her that she was going on a tour to Onna Village in Okinawa Prefecture in February 2019 to do a Wikipedia Town Editathon, I was very interested in going and applied to participate. The 25th issue of “Library Resource Guide”, published just before the tour, was a special issue on Wikipedia Town, so of course I bought and read it.

Finally, I arrived in Okinawa on February 3, 2019, and headed to the Onna Village Culture And Information Center, the venue for the event on the following day, a wonderfully located library with a view of the Okinawan sea from between the stacks on the second floor. Wikipedia Town was first guided by the Cultural And Information Center staff to various spots in the village. I was in charge of “Yamada Castle (山田城),” so I listened to the talk and took pictures with particular interest. In Okinawa, a castle is called a “gusuku”. Yamada Castle itself does not exist today, but the ruins of the castle are a national historic site. I was surprised to hear the Center staff vividly describe the centuries-old history of the castle.

After lunch, we returned to the Center to start editing Wikipedia. The “Yamada Castle” group consisted of two people from the Center, myself and one other person. The article itself was already on Wikipedia, but it was very simple, so we all added information to it. The participants from Tokyo were not familiar with local information, but they were all very experienced in using the bibliography, so they were able to add proper references to the information one after another. Whenever we were not sure how to edit a page, we asked a veteran Wikipedian, Racco, who was participating via Zoom from Tokyo, and we all agreed that we understood each other. We managed to finish editing the article within the time limit, and each group presented their results to each other to check the finished article, which was then reviewed by Racco. The photo shows “Cape Manzamo (万座毛),” where the article was enhanced at that time.

I could see that Wikipedia Town was an excellent initiative, but on the other hand, my own interests are not in geography or tourist information, but in music and literature, so I began to wonder vaguely if a different approach was needed. It was at this time that Racco invited me to participate in an event called Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon 2019. This was an event to put information about women and artists on Wikipedia, and the lecturers were Sae Kitamura a.k.a. Saebo and Racco. 15 people attended the event, including Norimaki, a veteran of Wikipedia. At that time, I had been wanting to write about a certain Japanese person for a long time, and I put the outline in my sandbox while learning various things from Norimaki. Meanwhile, a number of others were working on translating articles, and I became interested in translating foreign language articles.

After this event, I attended two study sessions of Wikidata, a sister project of Wikipedia, which I learned about from Racco, and got an overview of the project. I also got acquainted with Shusaku Higashi, the leader of the project, and Araisyohei, one of the participants. Recently, I read Ikki Omukai‘s article “Everything becomes Q” about Wikidata, and I think I have a better understanding of the reason for Wikidata’s existence. This wikidata is really useful when creating translation articles. I don’t know enough about Wikidata to be able to explain it, but it is true that my world has expanded a lot since then. Whenever I open a Wikipedia article, I open the corresponding Wikidata page, and if the “Description” field is empty, I copy the definition from Wikipedia to fill in the blanks. This makes me feel happy: “Ah, I’ve made another contribution to the world of the Web today!”