This page is within the scope of WikiProject Japan, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of Japan-related articles on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project, participate in relevant discussions, and see lists of open tasks. Current time in Japan: 09:02, July 1, 2024 (JST, Reiwa6) (Refresh)JapanWikipedia:WikiProject JapanTemplate:WikiProject JapanJapan-related articles
If anyone is in Kyoto and happens to visit the Kōdai-ji temple, a freely licensed photo of the android Mindar would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, gobonobo+c21:42, 22 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting article. Although I can't go there to take pictures, I translated the article into Japanese and posted notices on several pages requesting images. Good luck 狄の用務員 (talk) 04:26, 3 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes I am aware that the first family tree at Jimmu is from the Kojiki. But the Consorts and children section still looks pretty bad. CycoMa1 (talk) 21:38, 24 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Requesting someone to check an article for accuracy[edit]
I tried my darndest to try to make sure that the sources used in Puff-puff (Dragon Quest) are used accurately, but being that I ain't got Japanese knowledge, I can't guarantee that I didn't flub details. Would anyone be so kind as to check to see that I did? - Cukie Gherkin (talk) 22:04, 26 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I checked the article's description against 10 Japanese sources.
As far as I could see, all the sentences that were sourced from the Japanese article were identified within the article from which they were sourced. There appears to be no contradictory descriptions in the article and the source.
In addition, all 10 sites are operated by companies with solid identities and appear to meet Wikipedia's criteria. 狄の用務員 (talk) 21:04, 28 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is not uncommon to see a pronunciation, usually the perceived "correct" foreign (i.e. "English") pronunciation shown in IPA as part of or alongside a brand name. E.g. ɛ̃fini, or Olympus μ [mju:] (as it should be written †). (There was a small section in the IPA article, sourced to a blog written by John Wells, who is an international authority on all things phonetical, but it was removed for some stupid WP:REASON. So not much help available.) But the Olympus article has ended up being called "Olympus mju", which is simply nonsense. I put a comment on the talk page 10 years ago, as a result of which nothing happened. What would be the best way to go about sorting this out?
† The parenthetic bit is there because I don't know how to include something ending in ']' in a link.
Could someone from this WP:JAPAN take a look at Kasane Teto? I don't know how the notability of fictional characters are assessed or whether this is related to the scope of this WikiProject (it looks like it might be), but I'm not seeing how this meets (at least at the moment) WP:GNG or even WP:NFICTION. Perhaps there something there worth WP:DRAFTIFYing per WP:NEXIST which is why it's probably better for someone who might be more familiar with this type of article to take a look at it. There is a Japanese Wikipedia article about the subject at ja:重音テト which seems much more developed and which might be a helpful for additonal sourcing and expansion. FWIW, I came across the article via a recent Wikipedia Teahouse question WP:THQ#Wikipedia:Piccadilly. -- Marchjuly (talk) 08:24, 15 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I have made a major revision to the introduction of the article. Kasane Teto is both a fictional character and software sold as synthetic singing voice software. It is well established both as a fictional character and as synthetic voice software, and I personally consider it to have sufficient NOTABILITY. Although I did not have time to do it this time, I think the article will be further enriched by translating the other half of the Japanese version. 狄の用務員 (talk) 15:29, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for doing that 狄の用務員. Just some suggestions for future reference. If you're going to be translating content from a Japanese Wikipedia article into English, please make sure you properly attribute the original source article as explained in WP:TFOLWP; even if you first translate stuff into your user sandbox, you should makes sure to attribute not only for your sandbox but also for the article itself. In addition, if you're going to translating contact from Japanese Wikipedia and taking citations directly from Japanese Wikipedia, please remember things likes MOS:LQ and MOS:ALLCAPS, and make sure to convert the citation into a format accpetable for English Wikipedia (including updating the |access-date= after verifying the source). Japanese Wikipedia doesn't really follow MOS:MOS so you can find lots different styles of being used for non-Japanese words MOS:ALLCAPS, and it often uses zenkaku characters for brackets, punctuation marks, spaces, etc. It would also be helpful if you could use the |script-title=, |title=, |language= and |trans-title= parameters when adding citations to Japanese sources because it makes things that much easier for the reader. If you're not sure how to use these parameters, you can find examples in Template:cite web. Finally, since Japanese Wikipedia doesn't really need to worry about MOS:ENGVAR and MOS:DATEUNIFY when it comes to its articles, please try to remain consistent with the style chosen by the article's creator when adding dates or other text content. Doing so may help reduce the amount of cleanup need later on and helps article remain consistent stylistically. -- Marchjuly (talk) 01:17, 17 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I misunderstood that an addition was demanded, but it is not. I tried to do what I could knowing about my writing abilities, but sorry for the hassle. I will keep this in mind for future reference. I apologize for not being able to edit in a beautiful style. 狄の用務員 (talk) 12:02, 18 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm improving (I hope) the article for Japanese engineer Kaichi Watanabe. This brief article lists his employers later in his life. It lists their names under their late-19th century / early 20th century incarnations. I'm trying to resolve each to their current names/owners. Two I have problems with:
"Hokuestsu Railway Company" - I know there's a modern Hokuetsu line, which runs on the Hokuriku Main Line, and Shinetsu Main Line. Was Hokuetsu Railway Company the company that originally operated those those two lines? Is Hokuetsu a portmanteaux of Hokuriku and Shinetsu?
Looking at a the Google Translate of his ja.wikipedia article, it seems he had an even more extensive career back in Japan that that. But I'm not confident about adding detail from that (not least because of WP:CIRCULAR), and because I can't read the references it cites. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk10:29, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hokuetsu Railway Company (the Hokuestsu typo leads me to believe the Glasgow source is not great) was nationalized under the Railway Nationalization Act in 1907. We don't have an article on the original company, which ran a line between Niigata and Naoetsu from 1895 to 1907. It would seem anachronistic to link to a more modern line. I don't know what the gas company is, but I doubt it is Osaka Gas. Dekimasuよ!03:43, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your help. Yes, I was reluctant to link a modern line for the reason you say. I'll leave it for now. I imagine if someone fills out the relevant topics at some future date, they'll find Watanabe's article and link/fix accordingly. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk09:18, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Would someone from WP:JAPAN mind taking a look at Akira Watanabe (chess) and assessing it for notability for reasons other than being a chess player? (I've asked about that at WT:CHESS.) The current focus of the article and claim of notability seem to be the subject's chess achievements, but there might be other things the subject is also Wikipedia notable for. The article also appears to be a translation of the Japanese Wikipedia article ja:渡辺暁 (based on User talk:Ebefl#Ways to improve Akira Watanabe (chess)) but is lacking proper attribution per WP:TFOLWP. The attribution part most likely can be "fixed", but a lack of notability can't. The Japanese Wikipedia article does seem to be pretty much the same content-wise and is also basically only supported by a single WP:PRIMARY source (the other sources listed as "references" seem more like "explanatory notes"). -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:51, 23 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi, I'm trying to compile information on Noriaki Kiguchi (木口宣昭) to write an English language article. He was a wrestler for the Japanese national team that became a coach, founding his own dojo/school, influenced the development of wrestling and MMA in Japan, and trained several notable wrestlers and MMA fighters. I've found some info on the internet (in English and Japanese by using his name) and a surprising lot of coverage in archived American newspapers thanks to the WP Library. However, I would still like to find more Japanese-language resources, but I have no knowledge of Japanese, just Google Translate. I've tried several of the top newspapers with his name but haven't had much luck, but I know the coverage is out there. I'd appreciate all the help/direction that I can get. Spagooder (talk) 23:27, 27 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Converting full-width punctuation and currency symbols in horizontal text[edit]
Greetings! Over the past few years, there have been no objections to converting Latin letters and Arabic numerals to ASCII from their full-width forms when they appear in horizontal Chinese, Korean, or Japanese text. I've raised it on MOS and Wikiproject talk pages and made many cleanup edits to articles. I'm making a push to finish that cleanup, and I've been noticing that punctuation, currency symbols, and spaces have the same problem. It looks weird to have the full-width versions mixed in, and they sometimes leak into English-language text. My plan was to start converting punctuation and currency symbols in horizontal text (except where the characters themselves are being discussed) when the July 1 database dump becomes available in a week or two. If you have any questions, objections, concerns, or suggestions, please let me know! Open-circle full stop is not included; the affected characters are: ＂ ＃ ＄ ％ ＆ ＇ ＊ ＋ － ／ ＠ ＼ ＾ ＿ ｀ ￠ ￥ ￦ ＜ ＝ ＞ ｜ ￤ and the space character. -- Beland (talk) 17:51, 29 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In general this sounds like no problem. I am not sure about the following: ＊ － ＜ ＞.
＊ is often equivalent to a bullet point rather than an asterisk.
－ is no problem if the characters are really intending minuses rather than dashes.
＜ and ＞ are often used to denote parts of titles or quotations and in these cases are not equivalent to < and >. In running horizontal text in Japanese, I don't think they should always be converted to half-width brackets. Is there any editorial judgment involved in converting these? Dekimasuよ!03:05, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you mean basically a global replace on certain characters, I think this is a Bad Idea. Almost certainly the number of places where this makes things worse will be equal to or greater than the number of places where it makes things better. Fundamentally Japanese ("CJK") typography is incompatible with English ("Roman") typography; and the "full-width" terminology hopelessly confuses two separate issues: typography and encoding. So I think if there is a bit of Japanese text including any of these characters it is only wise to change them after looking carefully at the particular case, and even then I can't see why the change is necessary. Your point about people jumbling these characters into the middle of English text is valid, of course... (but there are much worse problems; try searching Electromagnetic vortex intensifier with ferromagnetic particles for "ABC", then try searching for "АВС"). Imaginatorium (talk) 04:00, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What are you looking for in terms of "better" and "compatibility"? What terminology would you prefer to refer to the above-listed characters? -- Beland (talk) 05:01, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't quite understand your question, but basically you are the one advocating the change, so it's your job to say why the change is an improvement. If all typography were done rationally then there would be no significance to the so-called "full-width" (全角) encodings, since they only represent typographical variants, not distinct E-characters (the "E" means that I am speaking English, and specifically exclude any Unicode terminology). But it's all messy, and any sort of mindless replacement is fraught with error. For example, (I know it's not in your list) in the previous sentence I enclosed a Japanese word in parenthesis with separating spaces; I could have used "full-width" parentheses, but in that case there would be no (extra) separating spaces. So perhaps you could give us some examples of how the change makes an improvement.
(Bit later) I see what you mean by "terminology", I think... The "full-width" thing is hopelessly confused and confusing, since a normal Roman 'A' is full-width already. But we are stuck with it. But anyway, I think it is likely that if you are quoting Japanese (or any CJK), the original encoding is more likely to give an appropriate result. Imaginatorium (talk) 09:07, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is certainly possible to make an ASCII U+0041 "A" just as typographically wide as a U+FF21 fullwidth『Ａ』(in the sense of the "East Asian width" Unicode character property described at Halfwidth and fullwidth forms) with the right font or CSS choices, but with default settings on Wikipedia, the ASCII "A" is narrower, and Latin-alphabet letters actually vary in rendered width, and do not span the full width of nearby kanji and kana.
"Preserve the original source encoding" is a bit of an incomplete answer, because different native Japanese sources encode the same text differently, and can also be mechanistically problematic. For example, looking at the references in Yawara!, I see that some have used ASCII Latin letters and some have used fullwidth Latin letters. This creates the same problem you note above in your Cyrillic "ABC" example; readers searching the page for "Yawara" as typed on an English-language keyboard match some but not all of the instances of that word (depending on their web browser's matching algorithm). This is why we've decided to convert all fullwidth Latin letters to ASCII, for consistency. -- Beland (talk) 21:17, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(Bit later still)... I just read your comments above more carefully, and you say: "It looks weird to have the full-width versions mixed in... [with Japanese text]". Really? This is the way Japanese is normally written (typeset), so it could presumably only look weird to someone who is not used to reading Japanese, surely?? Imaginatorium (talk) 09:12, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm thinking of mix-ins like『1＋1＝LOVE』in the midst of other Japanese text, which looks weird compared to "1+1=LOVE", especially in the context of a page that's mostly English text. Something like『１＋１＝ＬＯＶＥ』looks more normal (if it's in mixed in with Japanese inherently wide characters) because it's consistent, but it's currently not allowed because we already convert the numbers and letters to ASCII. The mixture of narrow and fullwidth characters also means that a search for "1+1" on the page (as entered on an English-language keyboard) may fail to match all instances of this expression. -- Beland (talk) 21:25, 30 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
