Japanese Wikipedia

Facts

Started: May 2001, substantially Nov 2002

Current size: 1,441,311 articles

Total edits: 102,825,213

Active editors: 12,488 in the past month

Areas of strength

Transportation in Japan, such as train, bus, etc.
Japanese TV show, Animation and Manga
Japanese pop-stars and actors
Geography of Japan and United States
"Pathnav" template for the logical representation and navigation to parent companies, such as from LUMIX to Panasonic.

Areas of weakness

Things outside of Japan
Culture as a whole
Art, literature, philosophy
Scientific articles including humanities and social science (jurisprudence, economics, etc.)

Who is the competition (print, online)?

What has its impact been?

From 2006, increase of access; as of March 2021, approx. 51.4M people in Japan are estimated to visit the website per month.

What language features are challenging?

What would surprise the outside reader about the community?

anonymity: close to 60% edits are submitted by unregistered users, while in the most of other Wikipedias the ratio remains under 20%. Registered users are rarely known by their real names.
Lack of significant user groups: most contributors have no continuous interaction between other users even on the wiki.
Underdevelopped policies: Due to the low level communications, the discussions tend to get stuck. Also around policies. There are few "official policies" and many documents remain drafts (officially not adopted yet), including WP:BP, WP:BLP.

What are some unique practices/characteristics?

Sysops have a dedicated mailing list (closed).
Main contact is outside of wikimedia.org (explained due to technical reasons related to encoding).
IRC is considered an esoteric tool rather than a common one.
Uniformity of contributors: Most contributors are Japanese both in nationality and ethnicity, and living in Japan (so many articles may have the systematic biases of Japanese residents).
Influenced from other net community (2channel); strong inclination to anonymity, sense of civility etc.
Low involvement of community to the governance, both local and global: (e.g. Around 50 sysops out of over 100K registered users, mailinglist wikija-l has low traffic).
Talk pages about articles are frequently used, instead of bold editing without discussion beforehand.
TK

Who were the earliest participants, who started it?

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Other historically prominent Wikipedians?

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And other active prominent Wikipedians?

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Emerging Wikipedians?

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Extraordinary small-shot Wikipedians?

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