世論 What Japan Thinks

japan.internet.com recently reported on this survey conducted by goo Research, their seventh regular Wikipedia survey. Note that as with most reports on japan.internet.com they report the highlights, not the full survey.

Demographics

Between the 28th of April and the 1st of May 2008 1,085 members of the goo Research online monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.0% of the sample were male, 16.3% in their teens, 18.1% in their twenties, 21.7% in their thirties, 16.2% in their forties, and 27.7% aged fifty or older.

Wikipedia is very good for simple facts - I used it just yesterday to look up English manga titles - but almost every time I examine an article on a subject I know something about it comes up lacking. Yes, yes, I can hear you all telling me to edit it myself, but I barely have time to write this blog, let alone try to keep up with my changes to make sure they get accepted. The latest I saw was a poorly-written complaint about their shops being expensive in the middle of an article about a major electronics company.

UPDATE: Thank you to one of my readers for edited Wikipedia to get rid of the whinge from the above-mentioned page!

I’ve also written a WordPress plugin for Wikipedia nofollow, that even after a year still regularly picks up a few backlinks.
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Please feel free to select one of the two words in the headlines that fits your own personal bias. I’d love to see a Wikipedia-free Google, myself, or at least an option to exclude it from searches unless specifically asked for. However, I do know that my attitude towards Wikipedia is probably seen by many as elitist, but if you too are fed up with too much Wikipedia in your Google and you run a blog, please feel free to download my Wikipedia nofollow WordPress plugin. It works with Japanese Wikipedia too, but I’ve not noticed it being used on any Japanese sites.

The above serves as an introduction to a recent survey reported on by japan.internet.com and conducted by goo Research entitled the fourth regular survey into Wikipedia and Wiki that they carry out every month.

Demographics

Between the 30th of October and the 2nd of November 2007 1,098 members of the goo Research online monitor pool successfully completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 53.2% of the sample was male, 16.4% in their teens, 18.3% in their twenties, 21.5% in their thirties, 16.3% in their forties, and 27.5% aged fifty or older.

I found the gripes listed in Q1SQ2 rather interesting; missing from the list above is one of my biggest gripes, that being that articles get too messy and should be reworked to remove duplicated information or to consolidate information. Another big issue, the ever-present trivia section, also didn’t feature. I’m not sure why people get worried about getting a virus from Wikipedia as there’s not really any way for that to happen. I was also surprised that so few mentioned grammar as a problem.
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The last time I looked at Wikipedia (just two days ago it was), it was wrong, and in addition the official building name is actually HEP FIVE, all in capitals, I believe. To see how the Japanese react to Wikipedia, japan.internet.com reported on the third regular monthly survey on Wikipedia conducted by goo Research.

Demographics

Between the 3rd and 7th of September 2007 1,078 members of goo Research’s online monitor pool completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.4% of the sample was male, 16.4% in their teens, 17.9% in their twenties, 21.7% in their thirties, 16.0% in their forties, and 28.0% aged fifty or older.

Just to stand on my soapbox for a minute, I think bloggers who link to Wikipedia are just being lazy. One gets no brownie points for linking to it, and in fact you are perhaps weakening your own article and strengthening Wikipedia in the search engine rankings. Conversely, if one links to another blogger who appears more knowledgeble on the subject, you are making contact with someone human, leaving a trackback in their blog that might result in a couple of new visitors to your site, and you may find the blogger will link back to you at a later date to return the favour.

In Q1SQ2, I think “other” is the correct answer! Wikipedia is by design unverified and unverifiable, so to ask the question implies a misunderstanding of the concept behind it.
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I happened to notice on YouTube that an offline and online Tokyo news broadcaster Tokyo MX is currently copying CNN’s YouTube presidential candidates debate idea, by gathering questions for everyone’s favourite politician, the great internationalist Shintaro Ishihara. They are looking for 30 second questions to pose to him at some as yet unannouced date, and I suspect that questions from foreign residents might have a good chance of getting through, especially given the quality of the other two posts to date!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJCduU2ChJ0

If anyone makes a contribution, please let me know and I’ll add it to this page.

I haven’t talked about Wikipedia for a while, so here goes with a report from japan.internet.com on the second regular survey from goo Research on Wikipedia. The previous survey was conducted two months ago.

Demogrpahics

Between the 9th and 13th of July 2007 1,045 members of goo Research’s online monitor group successfully completed an internet-based private questionnaire. 53.4% of the sample was male, 15.8% in their teens, 16.4% in their twenties, 22.3% in their thirties, 16.6% in their forties, and 29.0% aged fifty or older.
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japan.internet.com reported on the start of a new series of regular surveys being conducted by goo Research on the subjet of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Demographics

Over the 14th and 15th of May 2007, goo Research interviewed by means of a private internet-based questionnaire 1,087 members of its monitor panel. 47.1% of the sample was female, 11.7% in their teens, 21.3% in thier twenties, 19.4% in their thirties, 18.4% in their forties, and 29.2% in their fifites.

I think my opinion of Wikipedia is best expressed by the Wikipedia Nofollow WordPress plugin I developed. I feel it pollutes search results as bloggers tend to lazily quote it as it is the handiest reference, reinforcing its strength and putting it on top of Google searches for far too many keywords. In addition, with its nofollow policy, it doesn’t acknowledge its sources in the eyes of search engines, thus strengthening its position in the search engine optimisation wars.
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Not that this has anything in particular to do with Japan, but since I wrote my Wikipedia NoFollow plugin for WordPress there’s been quite a bit of action.

First, Andy Beard was good enough to write it up and promote it around a few websites. In addition, he also pointed out I had a bug in my comment script, whcih I’ve hopefully now fixed.

Next, there’s a Drupal plugin written by greggles that does the same thing for that platform.

Paul Montgomery at Tinfinger makes a case for dropping Wikipedia from Google and Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim is whipping up support for cutting off Wikipedia. Google Blogoscoped describes how they prevent spam links and many others discuss the topic in many languages. Track the nofollow tag at del.icio.us for the latest news.

From this website’s perspective, looking at my top 10 search phrases there is just one that is in direct competition with Wikipedia, and if anything I stand to gain by the addition of rel=”nofollow” as the two above the Wikipedia entry, both linked from Wikipedia, seem to be more poorly linked to other sites, so I perhaps could very well stand to gain from them losing their Wikipedia links.

A quick note that I’ve just hacked up a plugin that you may like to use in response to this news.

[All other text moved to the above permanent page to avoid duplicate content issues!]

japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by goo Research into Wikipedia usage. 1,088 members of their monitor panel successfully completed the internet-based opinion poll. 47.1% of the sample was male, 20.9% in their twenties, 41.8% in their thirties, 26.5% in their forties, and 10.8% in their fifties.

This month, Japanese Wikipedia was chosen as the overall grand prize winner in the “WEB of the Year 2006″ (Japanese link) awards. In addition, on the 15th of this month it crossed the 300,000 article mark.

With Wikipedia, if I am looking up a simple fact I know I can most likely trust the article, but for not just anything remotely controversial but also others that require specialised knowledge I find myself often wondering if it is correct or not, and end up doing my own research to corraborate the data! Having said all that, I did refer today to two articles which referred to current events and I was pleased to find information that I found useful and trustworthy. On the other hand, did I find it trustworthy just because the information supported my stance on the matters concerned?
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You may remember a couple of months back I wrote about how the Japanese_name article in Wikipedia was a bit naff. Well, just today I’ve been having a number of hits from that article in Wikipedia, which seems mostly unchanged to me. So, rather than be negative again about it, I think I’ll point out all the bits that seem wrong to me.
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