[Wikipedia-l] Does anyone knows the beginning of ja?

[Andre Engels]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 09:03:58 +0000 "Tomos at Wikipedia" 
<wiki_tomos at hotmail.com> wrote:

>I recall reading early Wikipedia-l posting (perhaps by Larry and/or Jason) 
>announcing the launch of several non-English Wikipedia
>circa May 2001. Japanese Wikipedia was among the first
>ones. Is there anybody who remembers how that happened?
>Was multilingualization of Wikipedia an idea of Jimmy
>and Larry from the beginning? Or was there someone else
>who suggested/ pushed for it? Is there any reason why
>Japanese was among the first?

As far as I know, it was Brion, who used it as a kind of 'experimenting 
area' or 'proof of concept' for creating a UTF-8 Wikipedia.

>In the early days, Aoineko was kind of "stationed" when
>there was only several edits a week, and welcomed the
>logged on users (there were only several back then) if
>I understand correct. Brion was there to fix bugs and
>take care of other technical aspects, too.  The first
>article seems to have been written by RoseParks (phonemes
>of Japanese). But there are only fragmental traces and
>virtually nobody knows those early days. Could somebody
>inform us of people who made significant contributions?

 From that I guess it would not be bad to consider Aoineko the one who 
started the Japanese Wikipedia. That also has the advantage of having 
someone who actually speaks Japanese and is still active on Wikipedia.

Andre Engels