On Tue, 17 Aug 2004 09:03:58 +0000 "Tomos at Wikipedia"
<wiki_tomos(a)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