Submissions/Outreach in Japan

This is a rejected submission for Wikimania 2012.

Submission no.

152

Title of the submission

Outreach in Japan

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)

presentation

Author of the submission

Kazuhiro Okada (Kzhr), 青子守歌 (aokomoriuta)

E-mail address

kzhr@mail.karpan.net

Username

kzhr, 青子守歌

Country of origin

Japan

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)

Japan, where is a country that 7.4 % of the entire Wikipedia visitors come from, has no Wikimedia chapter, but there have been Wikimedian groups and several attempts of outreaching. This presentation introduces such attempts with their backgrounds, analyses limits, and seeks a prospect for the movement.

From early days of Japanese Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedians, who make up most of the Wikimedian in Japan, tended not to meet together. Then, despite closed meetings were sometimes held, public meeting are held one or so in a year. This tendency seems to continue, even after the 2009 nation-wide conference, which took place in the University of Tokyo and had about 300 people. In fact, the 2010 conference was much smaller, and 2011 conference was not held.

However, outreaches in Japan are still trying by more local entities. We, Okada in Hokkaido and aokomoriuta in Kansai area, both work on local Wikimedian group. Wikimedians in Kansai, or WiKansai, where aokomoriuta serves financial manager, is the largest Wikimedian group in Japan now. WiKansai has had monthly meetings and seminars in many local conferences. Wikimedians of Hokkaido, or WoH, of which Okada is part, also has joined local conferences. A WikiX meeting was held by WiKansai with the aid of Hatena, Inc. in Kyoto, and they helped the first Edit-a-thon in Japan, 2012. These two groups have not, in fact, had a firm recognition from the communities yet. This is also a challenge for outreach in Japan.

Most of the presentation will be spent for a history of them and what should be learned from them. In short, the outreach movement in Japan is slightly low. It is a reason why there is no chapter in Japan. In spite of little outreaching, popularity of Wikipedia is still growing and needs for publicizing the nature of the project is also growing, thus, we should seek a way to accelerate the outreaching movement in a regular basis. We will try to find a key in the last.

Track

WikiCulture and Community; Research, Analysis, and Education

Length of presentation/talk

25 Minutes

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?

We would love to if either of us will be granted scholarship.

Slides or further information (optional)

Special request as to time of presentations

Interested attendees

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1. Sumanah (talk) 18:23, 21 March 2012 (UTC) I would like to know how to make developer outreach in Japan more effective, and predict I could learn lessons here that would be useful to me.
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