Awards

In September 2004, the Japanese Wikipedia was awarded the "2004 Web Creation Award Web-Person Special Prize"^[10] from the Japan Advertisers Association.^[11] This award, normally given to individuals for great contributions to the Internet in Japanese, was accepted by a long-standing contributor on behalf of the project.

Editing

• An edit is kept only if it is legal under both Japanese and United States laws, to account for the fact that the vast majority of contributors live in Japan. This has two major consequences:
  • The fair use provisions of US law are not considered to be applicable. Articles and media files which do not have a GFDL-compatible license are prohibited, even if they would be legal under the "fair use" doctrine in the US.
  • Materials considered illegal cannot be kept in the archive, even reverted by oneself but caught in history archive. If an illegal edit is inserted between valid versions, an admin may make specific revisions inaccessible from the history.^[12]
• Quotation is discouraged. There is controversy over the GFDL compatibility of quotations. Articles that contain quotations will be deleted unless they meet all the following legal requirements:
  1. The source is clearly referred to.
  2. The quotation is necessary.
  3. The quoting and quoted works can respectively be regarded as the principal and subordinate both in quantity and quality.
  4. The quoting and quoted works are clearly distinguishable.
• Cut-and-paste moves within Wikipedias, including merging, splitting, and translation from another language, are not allowed unless the original article source and date is explicitly referred to in the edit summary, because such moves are considered to be GFDL violations.^[13] Articles created in such a manner will be deleted. A comparable policy is in place on the English Wikipedia, but it is only casually enforced.

The Japanese Wikipedia has the most anonymous contributions as compared to other major languages in Wikipedia.^[14] The image is as of December 2007.

• Editors on the Japanese Wikipedia generally do not create independent lists of volumes of manga, or episodes of anime; however, there are exceptions, e.g. ja:Q.E.D. 証明終了のエピソード一覧 and ja:ONE PIECE (アニメ) のエピソード一覧. Articles about manga works usually do not contain lists of chapters. Also lists of episodes of anime embedded in related articles and independent lists of episodes of anime do not contain plot synopsis.

Community

• Anonymous contributions are high compared to other major language versions of Wikipedia (see graph).
• The Japanese Wikipedia has the lowest number of administrators per active editors (only 0.3%).^[15]
• Edit wars are strongly frowned upon. Articles may be protected as a result of an edit war with as little as three or four edits. Protected pages will not be unprotected unless someone explicitly requests it. Perhaps because of this, as of September 2005 the Japanese Wikipedia had the second-highest number of articles protected for over two weeks, after the German Wikipedia.^[16] In May 2008, 0.0906% of articles were fully protected (only editable by admins), which was by far the highest percentage among the ten largest Wikipedias.^[17] Articles on sensitive topics, such as Japanese war crimes and current territorial disputes, are almost always under lengthy protection.
• On April 18, 2010, there was a proposal to create a new namespace specifically for WikiProjects to shorten the name of a WikiProject. This proposal finally passed and a new namespace named "プロジェクト:" (Project:) was created for WikiProjects on September 20 the same year (UTC).^[18]
• The edition stresses the fact that it is not a news bulletin, and discourages edits on current events.^[19]
• In keeping with the strong aversion to edit wars, the administrators react negatively to cases where many minor edits are made to a single article in a short period of time.^[20]
• The Japanese Wikipedia is Japan-centered, due to the fact that the overwhelming majority of editors are Japanese people, nearly all living in Japan. When referring to places outside Japan they are often called "overseas", and references to Japanese perspective on articles are common. They are trying to discourage this tendency.^[21]

Policies

• Articles will be deleted if they contain the names of private citizens, unless they are public figures (under section B-2 of Japanese deletion policy). For example, an article about Shosei Koda, a Japanese citizen kidnapped in Iraq, does not refer to him by name,^[22] but former Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda's name may be mentioned due to his public position. Convicted criminals and their victims are considered private citizens, even if the case was extensively covered in Japanese media, and their names may not be published until their death.^[23]
• The Japanese edition of the English policy Ignore All Rules (directly linked to one of Five Pillars) is neither a policy nor a guideline.
• The Japanese edition of the English Wikipedia how-to guide How to write a plot summary is a formal guideline.
• The Japanese edition of the English Wikipedia page Handling trivia (which is an explanatory supplement to the Manual of Style guideline on trivia sections) is a formal guideline as well.
• The Japanese edition of the English banning policy is not a policy, for lack of the Arbitration Committee.
• Toukou Burokku Irai (Requesting for Block), which has no corresponding rules in English Wikipedia, is frequently used. And often well-known editors who have been active for a long time are blocked indefinitely. The blocked user may appeal for lifting the block, as in the case of blocking in English Wikipedia.
• There is no local chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in Japan.

Allegations of historical revisionism

In a 2018 book, Florian Schneider of Leiden University compared and contrasted Chinese (Wikipedia and Baidu) and Japanese articles (南京事件) on the Nanjing Massacre. Schneider was critical of some aspects of each version, but noted that a 2015 version of the Japanese article attempted to justify the rape and murder of Chinese civilians by claiming Japanese soldiers were doing it in the context of apprehending Chinese defectors. Schneider also noted that there were also few to no images on the article; instead it contained a single image of Japanese soldiers checking Chinese prisoners for weapons.^[6]

In a 2019 paper, Karl Gustafsson of Stockholm University compared various Chinese and Japanese Wikipedia articles. Gustafsson was critical of aspects of both versions. For the Nanjing Massacre article, Gustafsson noted that the first paragraph of the Japanese version expressed doubt about the details of the incident and "thereby portrays the Japanese military less negatively". For the article on the Battle of Shanghai, Gustafsson noted that the Japanese article generally emphasized violence by the Chinese combatants against both Japanese soldiers and civilians, while omitting mentions of civilian deaths from Japanese air raids. Gustafsson described the Japanese article as framing the Japanese invasion of the city as a reaction to Chinese aggression.^[7]

In a 2021 article published in Slate magazine, Yumiko Sato expressed concerns regarding certain articles on the Japanese Wikipedia, suggesting the presence of historical revisionism and whitewashing. Notable articles mentioned included the Japanese Wikipedia articles on the Battle of Hong Kong (香港の戦い), comfort women (日本の慰安婦), the Nanjing Massacre (南京事件), and Unit 731 (731部隊).^{[4][5][lower-alpha 1]}