利用者:Kurt Jansson/questionsAbout the community (コミュニティについて)Question 1
Answer 1. Japanese Wikipedia community has not clearly organized dispute resolution system. Official policies provide the community with two stages resolution system, made from “Requests for comments” (WP:RFC, see below) and “Requests for blocking”(WP:RFB), while it is not mandatory to use those all stages. There is no specific user group for resolutions, either official one (cf. Arbcom) voted by the community or volunteering informal one (cf. MedCabal on English Wikipedia). The page “Requests for comments” (WP:RFC) is considered a place for conflict resolution, although it is not obligated to bring a dispute up to that page. Comments are collected as free answers and everyone can start calling for comment on a topic. It lacks any official format or procedure which Enwiki RFC obtains. On the community there is no standard opinion what WP:RFC is to be (e.g. if the person in the subject should comment or not), and what WP:RFC is itself a frequently disputed topic. There is no clear eligibility to submit to WP:RFC, anonymous editors (including sockpuppets of indefinitely blocked people) therefore appear sometimes. As for “Requests for blocking” only registered editors with rule-defined amount of edit activity are eligible to submit their comments and vote. Informal dispute resolutions are cared by volunteering editors who find problems eventually and decide to be involved. They join discussions on talk pages, try to take wider audience’s attention or use the method described above. Several ways are used to take community’s attention, including WP:VP (known “idobata”), Portal pages’ talks, notes using template on articles. Most of discussions to solve conflicts happen on the wiki, mailing list (wikija-l@lists.wikimedia.org) or IRC (#wikipedia-jp and other freenode channels) are seldom utilized.
Question 2
Answer 2. Articles suffered many problems: vandalism, blanking, intentional submission of false information or copyright infringement. Between users, personal attacks, disruption on discussions or proudly stubborn users cause heated disputes. To solve those problems, users utilize talk page to submit a warning, or project pages including Requests for comment and requests for blocking (On Japanese Wikipedia blocking is determined on community vote). Some banned users have held grudges against Wikipedia, and vandalize it, using sockpuppets (multiple accounts). Multiple accounts is used also in heated arguments for fraudulent that an opinion is supported by many people. In 2007, Admins’ noticeboard was launched where admins received reports on vandals, personal attacks and uncivil comments and deal those incidents on their discretion, instead of community vote which had been dealt with those incidents also as well as other disputes. Introduction of new scheme sort out the situation to some extent, but attack from indefinitely banned users with multiple accounts is tend to continue for a long time over months or even over a year, watching their disruptive behavior s is a burden for admins and users who records their attack and fight with those malicious users. As for Watching tools, irc.wikimedia.org channels and VandalFighter are not popular on Japanese community, and people detect vandalism in sight on Recentchange report generated by Linky-ja and posted to #wikipedia-ja-article or just on Recentchanges of Wikipedia directly.
Question 3
Answer 3. Regarding the working climate of producing articles in the ja-wikipedia, editing works are up to each editors in general. There are difficulties in discussions and concensus making processes in ours, because that extraordinarily many anonymous IP users exist in contrast to other communities. In addition, there exist the gigantic sites, out of ja-wikip, so-called 2 Channel (Ni-channeru ), which operate tons of (almost million) bulletin boards where many anonymous people write messages freely without correctness/responsibilities, and from which people visit to ours who make vandalisms and attackings to users of our community, thus obstructing discussions and editing processes in ours. Really serious problems. This 2 Channel is the very unique site and no similar sites exist in other languages. Regarding assignments of working tasks and roles, there are no distinct ones, though admins etc. exist. Each persons do their variois activities in their favaourite/interesting fields. We have also wiki-projects, and establishing editing format for articles in some partial fields, but overall they don't seem to function well. (Addition) : We have wiki-portals too. Portals take some parts of promoting creations of new articles and improvements of poor articles. These achieve some results. But portals are overall tend to be inactive since people joining and working in portals are few. There are also /Request for New artcle creation/, /Clean-up request/, /Request for expanding article/. They have some effectiveness, though not sufficient.
Question 4
Answer 4. Totally, we evaluate that our community does not seem to stand and operate well. There are maybe many reasons which can not be clearly analyzed and understood at present. One thing we want to point out is that our guidelines documents etc. are translation of those in English, and expression style of sentences and ideas are not well fitted with Japanese culture, so unfamiliar/difficult to understand to most ja-wikipedia users. And in addition, they have so large volumes that many members of our community can not sufficiently understand them. As for the characteristics of ja-community which we should tell, the ratio of anonymous IP users are so large, and the mainly negative effects of the above-mentioned gigantic bulletin boards site, i.e. 2 Channel are problems. Particularly, (malicious) personal attacks to the users of our community by anonymous ones, which might be originated from this gigantic site, are highly severe beyond expression. There do exist no such problem in the other language communities. And the fact that Japanese language is unique language isolate, yet which has almost 1 hundred and twenty million (120 million) speakers. Therefore, we can communicate and talk almost everythings from ancient Greek civilization and its philosophies to latest scientific topics such as bio-technology, computer sciences by Japanese, but this results that our members feel difficulty to communicate with people of other language communities by contemporary de-facto world common-language (ligua franca in the present world), i.e. English. So, our community has tendency of lack of internationality. For instance, participants of wikimania are few, or the ratio of contributions to the Wikimedia foundation in Japanese Yen is very small, comparing to the largeness of our product and community scale (our encyclopedia has around 350 thousand articles.) This shows the lack of our consciousness that wikipedia is the project international. Our community may be characterized by its closed, self-contained culture. In addition, we have fairly introduced articles from English wikip, or sometimes fr-wikip, de-wikip, through translation. But reverse movements are relatively low. (On the other hand, Korean or Chinese wikip's seem to introduce from Ja-wikip, but reverse movements are also low.) There is other distinct problem, that is, we have few admins (now around 55 persons), which is too small number when considering our community size. Our community has few strongs, and has many problems indicating our weaknesses.
About the created product (事典編纂について)Question 5
Answer 5. As the current conditions, we feel that most editors are lack of wide-range of knowledges, historical visions and recognitions, therefore the articles relating to sub-cultural fields, such as manga (comics), animes, cinema-films, TV broadcast programmes, or J-POP (Japanese pop music), take very large part, and also recent materials which have no range of historical traditions, such as topics, events, new words, new concepts taken place in only recent 1 or 2 years time span, have attracted many users. We hope editors have more wide historical and global views. In our wikip, people have the opinion that electronic/ computer technology based wikip-Encyclopedia may have infinite capacity, which is thought to be the major difference from traditional paper encyclopediae, so infinite entries, large volumes are desirable. On the other hand, there is another opinion that volumes of each articles shall have adequate, proper size, that is, wikipedia shall not be simple accumulation of data. The latter seems to be minor group. Regarding to role models, a few people need some models and consider the traditional paper Japanese encyclopediae as model, but most editors' opinion is that wikip is the place where they write anything, and seem not to have clear model images. (Remark) : one person says this is but personal opinion.
Question 6
Answer 6. Among contributors, it looks like a minority those who put priority in quality control of article. The majority of contributors don’t take care of article quality. To improve articles, Japanese Wikipedia has request pages including “Request for Expanding (addition)” [1] and “Request for Review” [2]. But those request systems don’t seem to work well. Daily "Contest of New Contributions", "Featured article Candidate Nomination", and annual "Writing Contests" exist. Those contests/nomination pages influence but a few number of articles, and the project isn’t so much affected in entire. "Contest of New Contributions" aims to select three articles listed on Main page daily, so that over 1,000 articles win this contest and few thousand articles are estimated to be reviewed in a year at that page. On the other hand, close to hundred thousand articles are submitted to the project in a year, thus it is considered that this contest doesn’t influence widely to the project, from the view-point of the purpose enhancing the quality of ja-Wikipedia in total. “List of Articles Existing in Many Wikipedias", "Translation Requests" benefit to create articles in quality, but their impact is also limited. User communities, built on Portals or WikiProjects, could be considered to grow core groups which are in charge of quality control, but currently on Japanese Wikipedia, those pages don’t play eminent rolls due to immaturity of those user subcommunities. Short and poorly described articles tend to stay in this condition (so-called “substub”), and if such poor-quality article is considered to treat an unimportant theme, it could be listed on "Requests for Deletion" due to “lack of further development possibility”, and be deleted.
Question 7
Answer 7. Till recent time, many people are not so conscious of the concept of neutrality when creating articles. In articles dealing newly happened social events, matters, or currently proceeding and continuing events, controversy and disputes about correctness and neutrality frequently take place. As for NPOV problems, ja-wikip may be typically characterized in the confrontation of certain political standing points. There are severe confrontations regarding Deutung/ interpretations of historical problems about the period of ruling of the Empire of Japan among editors who stand on either the left-wing views or the right-wing (correctly conservatism) views. The points of disputes are mainly relate to the relations of Japan and the certain East Asian countries, i.e. China (PRoC), Korea and North Korea. In these problems such as Jugun-ianfu (en:Comfort women), Nankin-gyakusatsu (en:Nanking Massacre) or Yasukuni-sanpai (靖国神社問題, see en:Yasukuni Shrine) etc., realizing (achieving) neutrality is quite difficult. Both sides have their own sources and both the sides tend to think that other opinions can not be accepted and so should be removed from the articles description, thus realization of the NPOV is difficult. Therefore, articles of such themes are usually lack of neutrality when they are newly created. The NPOV is that 1) if there are reliable source(s), editors shall write according to the(se) source(s), and 2) if there are two or more reliable sources which have contardictive statements, we shall write both opinions/ statements and we shall not judge and decide which is correct or which is truth. (Addition) : Some people who have enough understanding of the principle of the NPOV, they think the considerations to NPOV are very important when creating new articles. But many users/ editors have not enough understandings of the Principles of Wikipedia at the present state of us.
Question 8
Answer 8.
It seems that the average age of members of the ja-wikipedia community relatively low. To write good articles, editors are required to have both global view-point and historically wide-ranged knowledges and recognitions. But such editors seem to be few in us. Of course, there be many excellent editors in us, but there are more people who have addictive interestings in Otaku-like subcultural fields such as railroad stations and trains in Japan, roads list, animation, game-softs, voice-actresses/ -actors, and TV/radio announcers. So our encyclopedia has excessively large amount of such articles. In thses fields, editors' view-points are often adhered to recent two or three years ranged popularized matters, and thus geographical/historical POV inevitably tends to take place due to their narrow views. On the other hand, we are having fairly enough number of fine Major Fields articles at the same time. In contrast to quality level of en-wikip fine articles, our quality level is still low. We think, however, quality is gradually improving in us, e.g., through translating fine articles in en-wikip etc. Comparing with the conditions in 2 years ago, totally saying, both quantity and quality of articles seem to have been steadily improved. (Opinion of one person) There is also an answer that as a total overview, the present conditions of ja-wikip are similar to those of en-wikip in 1 or 2 years ago, and you may be obtain the image of ja-wikip by thinking the those conditions of en-wikip. (On the one hand, de-wikip has been going along their unique way, but en-wikip had started its way on the status without model, and ja-wikip has followed the manner of en-wikip and its quality has gradually improved through translation of excellent articles of en-wikip.) (Opposition) However, there is an opposing to this opinion. The situations of en-wikip and ja-wikip are definitely different and not comparable. E.G. in en-wikip, Jimmy Wales and/or the Foundation directly intervene important points of administration, and contents themselves (en:WP:OFFICE). In addition, the states of en-wikip in 1 year ago already far more advanced. Therefore, such imaging or simile are inadequate. The another person states. (That is, there are sub-communities in en-wikip, which ja-wikip does not equip. Based on these sub-communities, introduction of peer reviews, evaluation and ranking of each article, starting of attachment of source-template to every articles, and utilisation of Encyclopedia Britanica, 1911, PD version were already realized one year ago.)
Most editors on ja-wikip are Japanese. Japan is the only advanced nation except Euro-American nations. (In technologies, economics, social structures, various sciences, and cultures etc.) In fact, among many wikipedias, ja-wikip is highly larger than zh-wikip, if comparing in quantity and quality. Wikips larger than or equal to ja-wikip in contents are all those of European/North-American languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Polish etc.) This is since :
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