Re: [Wikimedia-asia-chapters] Citation Party in Tokyo (出典をつけよう大会 in 東京) 2012-01-28

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]] _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-asia-chapters mailing list Wikimedia-asia-chapters(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-asia-chapters