Dear all,

Let me share another event report and news of an emerging user group
from Tokyo, Japan.

Five Wikipedians in the greater Tokyo area including me held a
citation party in Tokyo in the end of this January [1], which was then
followed by another one in Kansai as reported by Kizu-san recently on
this list.  It looks like Japanese Wikimedians are getting active
offline here and there!

Like other Wikipedias, the core community of the Japanese Wikipedia
has always hoped to overhaul missing citations for important articles,
which sometimes were overlooked behind the growth of the site.
Following a call by [[User:Vigorous_action]] (who was an organizer of
the Kansai event in February), we gathered at the Chiyoda public
library, in the center of the Tokyo metropolis.

On January 28th, 2012, five attendees spent the whole three hours
intensively adding citations to the Japanese Wikipedia.  We had
reserved a conference room with 6-8 sheets as a volunteer group (with
no special cooperation with the staff at the library).  All of the
five were experienced Wikipedia editors and they were advised to find
target articles and prepare resources in advance (we expected
otherwise a 3-hour session would be too short to produce meaningful
outcome).  Each of us brought (or borrowed from the shelves)
biographies, fact books and other kinds of resources, to carefully
compare statements written on Wikipedia articles and those on the
books.  Subject areas we worked on range from linguistics and
philosophy to biology and computer science.  After finishing the work,
we shared techniques to choosing articles with rather easy
improvements, finding missing citations from resources, and using
tools like citation templates effectively.  (I found it helped me to
improve articles quickly if I use both concise books written for
casual readers and large authoritative reference works.)

As far as I know, this time was, if rather small in scale, the first
occasion for people living around Tokyo to have an event purely
focused onto the collaboration between Wikimedians, in contrast to
more outreach-focused events in the past, like the Wikimedia
Conference Japan 2009 [2].  I am feeling that the Tokyo area is
finally filling one of the missing pieces of the puzzle in the
Wikimedia movement.  Let us hope events like the Citation Party in
Kansai and this will continue to consolidate collaboration between
Wikimedians, ensuring continued growth of the movement in Japan.

Encouraged by this successful editathon, we are going to establish
"Wikimedian Society of Tokyo" (東京ウィキメディアン会), a local
Wikimedia user group for people around Tokyo.  We are now rapidly
preparing our activity plans.  Please stay tuned for more progress at
our (soon-to-be-official) website: http://tokyo.wikimedia.jp.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meetup/Tokyo/33
[2] http://wcj2009.info

Best regards,

Yusuke Matsubara
[[User:Whym]]

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