Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Japan/Archive/April 2007

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Contents

Request for name translations

There are several pages with results from elections that haves names in japanese instead of english. I'm not so good at translating name but someone who are might change them.

Here's a list of the pages:

--Jonte-- 13:55, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

Done, except for Higashiosaka by-election, 2006, which I can't find in Japanese. If you can find a link for me, that will help. I found this site which very helpfully includes the reading for the kanji in the names. Search for "[kanji] site:senkyo.janjan.jp" on Google and you'll find most any election listed there. For example, "樋口恵子 site:senkyo.janjan.jp" brings you to a list which includes this page. Look for pages in the search results with the title "ザ･選挙　-選挙情報-" where the correct year is in the URL. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:48, 1 April 2007 (UTC)
This should be it for the 2006 Higashiosaka by-election:
http://www.senkyo.janjan.jp/election/2006/27/00003067.html
http://www.pref.osaka.jp/senkan/date/h18hugi_hoketu/kaihiga_last.html
--OhMyDeer 02:37, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Gret, but I still don't understand how they count votes, since they're can have 21,726.555 votes, really weird. But that's another topic, thanks for the help. --Jonte-- 18:18, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
That was a very good side-question and made me wonder, too, so I looked for the official explanation. The cause is that some ambiguous votes can get distributed pro rata as deemed appropriate by the officials. In the case of this Higashiosaka by-election, I assume some one has voted writing "Koichi" (in Japanese, of course), but without making clear enough to which of the two candidate Koichi (Nishino, or Munekiyo) it was for. --OhMyDeer 04:24, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Roads in Japan Category

I've created a category for roads in Japan at "Category:Roads in Japan". Please add expressways and any other roads you find to this category. -- Exitmoose 02:09, 2 April 2007 (UTC) Ah, I've just noticed that there is a "Category:Expressways in Japan". I suppose there's little need for this category, in that case. Use it if you need it though. -- Exitmoose 02:19, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

There is also Cat:National highways of Japan which is a subcat of Cat:Road transport in Japan. - Neier 05:21, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Following up, that cat was renamed in accordance to the in/of country naming conventions. It is now Cat:National highways in Japan. Neier 10:14, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Kansai ben article dispute. Opinions requested

There is a dispute over whether or not a "Translating Kansai ben into English" section should be included on the Kansai ben article. Because of its nature, Kansai ben is often translated as a Southern American English accent, as in the series Magical☆Shopping Arcade Abenobashi. There is a reference, in the translator's notes for that series.

The Pros think that this is a relevant and notable part of Kansai ben, and one where English speakers are likely to encounter it.

The Cons think that it isn't relevant to Kansai ben itself, and that if it is a necessary article then is should be seperate, a "Translating Kansai ben into English" article.

I am personally in the Pro camp, and think that any seperate article would get hit with a merge tag pretty soon. But I would like to get some other peoples opinions. The discussion is here.MightyAtom 02:38, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Actually, no one ever suggested an article about translating Kansai-ben into English, and it wasn't until just today that anyone suggested broadening the scope of the section to translation in general (I suggested it there, and I see you are mentioning it here). One editor was very strongly in favor of writing a section all about anime (as shown in the section header), and that was what was disputed. We argued that it was more well suited for addition in an existing article on translation, like one on dubbing or subtitling. I still believe that a section that's only about anime is inappropriate for the Kansai-ben article. Dekimasuよ! 02:55, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


Empire of Japan (culture, religion and education) needs your help

Empire of Japan (culture, religion and education) has been tagged "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards" since November 2005. "The oldest cleanup requests are the highest priority, to prevent embarrassing problems from going unfixed for an indefinite length of time" [1]. It looks to me like information in this article should be moved to other articles and this article deleted, however there was already previous debate about this, the details of which I don't understand. Anybody care to take a look at this? Thanks. -- Writtenonsand 06:09, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I looked at the previous debate, and it seems as if almost everyone was in favor of deletion, while the one person who disagreed changed his mind. Why it was the discussion was marked as "keep", I have no idea. In any case, obviously not many people are reading or editing the article. It should be merged and deleted with the three articles cited in the previous discussion. -- Exitmoose 06:32, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Miyazaki Prefecture

I updated Prefectures of Japan along with other articles as a result of the merger of Kitagawa, Miyazaki into Nobeoka, Miyazaki. My question is about the municipality count. It read 40 but the new number is 30. That seems like a steep decrease. Were districts counted as municipalities in this table, and should they be? Municipalities of Japan#Non-municipality makes it clear that districts are not municipalities. Fg2 05:21, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

It seems clear that districts are not municipalities. Also, if you add up all the municipalities in Miyazaki Prefecture, then add the districts, it comes pretty close to 40. So I'm guessing that was the case. BilabialBoxing 05:28, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Accordcing to the Japanese Wikipedia, Miyazaki Prefecture has 30 municipalities -- 9 cities (Shi), 18 towns (Cho/Machi), and 3 villeges (Mura/Son). It also shows that these municipalities have recently undergone substantial resutructuring.
  • Tano-Cho, Sadowara-Cho, and Takaoka-Cho merged with Miyazaki-Shi on 1st January 2006.
  • Yamanokuchi-Cho, Takajo-Cho,Yamada-Cho, and Takazaki-Cho merged with Miyakonojo-Shi on 1st January 2006.
  • Nango-Son, Saigo-Son, and Kitago-Son merged to create Misato-Cho on 1st January 2006.
  • Kitakata-Cho and Kitaura-cho merged with Nobeoka-Shi on 20th February 2006.
  • Togo-Cho merged with Hyuga-Shi on 25th February 2006.
  • Suki-son merged with Kobayashi-Shi on 20th March 2006.
  • Kitagawa-Cho merged with Nobeoka-shi on 31th March 2007.
So, the number of municipalities have actually decreased considerably.--Dwy 07:39, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for your replies. It doesn't appear to be a problem. Fg2 09:54, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

I'm still ploddng through all the prefectures, updating them per Wikipedia:WikiProject Japan/Gappei. I'm currently working on Miyazaki. One of the things I do is update the municipality count in Prefectures of Japan. It should not include districts, and it has signficantly decreased for many prefectures (Ehime went from 70 to 28, Gifu from 99 to 49, Hiroshima from 86 to 37, Kumamoto from 94 to 48). -- Rick Block (talk) 15:53, 7 April 2007 (UTC)
Here's the link to the homepage of Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications[2] with regards to this subject. It's unfortunately in Japanese, but is supposed to be the most official reference. I tried a little looking for an English equivalent of this contents, but without success so far. Navigate from the provided link to "

◇都道府県別市町村数の変遷（平成１１年３月３１日以降の全てを収録" and fetch the PDF there.--OhMyDeer 16:47, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

How's my reading? Call 1-800...

I've been working on the Branded to Kill article a bit and took a stab at incorporating some information from Japanese language sources. Problem being I wouldn't exactly consider myself literate. Anyway, I wonder if someone wouldn't mind looking over the Soundtrack prose to see if I'm even close. Also, I'd like to add the special features from the Japanese DVDs. As near as I can tell the first edition contains 1. Something about the original release, 2. Seijun Suzuki interview, 3. Joe Shishido interview, 4. Annu Mari photo gallery, 5. Another Shishido interview? 6. Trailers for Pistol Opera, the Taisho Trilogy and Fighting Elegy, link here. At this point I'm not sure if the 2nd edition has any special features, link here. Any help would be appreciated. If not, that's okay too. Doctor Sunshine talk 03:48, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Yamato period provinces vs countries

I recently translated the article Nakoku from the Japanese Wikipedia (ja:奴国), and created Category:Former countries in Japanese history... but in the translation, I had difficulty with how to interpret or represent 国 - is it "province" or "country"?. Prior to the institution of the ritsuryō system, were places like Nakoku, Tsushimakoku and other -koku placenames which might appear in ancient records separate entities (countries, states) or were they provinces within a centralised, unified, organized Yamato state? Thanks. LordAmeth 14:27, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

As a rough way of understanding, it can be generally said that "国" prior to 4th century can be translated to chiefdoms or kingdoms, or at least some kind of territorial, political unit. In its earlier stages, they seem to be sometimes translated as tribes, or tribal chiefdoms. The followings may be of better help to understand these than my clumsy explanation:
On ther other hand, the "国"s on the mainland or Honshu island, gradually expanding from west to east and after the ritsuryo Japan are probably in many cases "provinces", although it may also mean a land with certain political unit that was not clearly under the control of Yamato Japan (note that the Japanese history from this period onwards is obviously viewed from the side of Yamato.)
The Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms, or the 魏志倭人伝 list around thirty "国" as being found, with what the Chinese people at the time believed to be habitated by "倭人 'Wa-jin'". Those included Na, with what they record as having 20k households, as well as Tsushima, as one example, while there were others recorded to have bigger habitation. Taking a view from the side of Japan, according to historians Tsushima, for example, was probably a province with a sort of regional governer or even only a guard stationed.
To summarize, those "国" appearing in the pre 4th century can be most safely said they were not a part of Yamato state, but whether each one of them were a country or a province may have to be analysed on a case-by-case basis. With that said, given the recognized (recorded size) and the notable relationship it had with China of the time, Nanokuni can be called at least a chiefdom or a kingdom, if not a state.
Hope this helps. --OhMyDeer 16:16, 8 April 2007 (UTC)
It does. Thank you very much. LordAmeth 16:26, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Bilateral relations discussion

I would like to invite you all to participate in a discussion at this thread regarding bilateral relations between two countries. All articles related to foreign relations between countries are now under the scope of WikiProject Foreign relations, a newly created project. We hope that the discussion will result in a more clean and organized way of explaining such relationships. Thank you. Ed ¿Cómo estás? 18:06, 8 April 2007 (UTC)

Gardens

At Commons:Category:Kubota Garden, I've added some rather nice pictures of a Japanese garden in Seattle, Washington. However, I know very little about any formalities of Japanese gardens, and right now the captions just say that it is part of this (20 acre) garden. If anyone can help identify particular formal elements, please enhance my captions. - Jmabel | Talk 04:48, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

"Ware" vs. "Yaki"

Types of pottery are apparently appended with "yaki" in the Japanese. However, most English speakers use "ware" with the name, for example, "Satsuma ware" rather than "Satsuma-yaki." Most of the pages regarding such wares (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_pottery) use the "-yaki" suffix. To reflect English usage, a number of the pages regarding wares need to be moved. I think this is pretty obvious, but if there are any objections please let me know. Liashi 20:42, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good. Just be careful with any that you think might use yaki as a more integral part of the name. I realize that's a somewhat subjective thing. Still, we don't call ukiyo-e "Floating World -e" or "Ukiyo pictures" - it's more commonly known even in English as ukiyo-e, and any partial translation would sound weird. I don't really know of any particular examples in which this would come up for pottery in particular, but it's something to keep in mind. LordAmeth 00:27, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Former countries

As there are already categories for Category:Former countries in Chinese history and Category:Former countries in Korean history, I created one for Japan (Category:Former countries in Japanese history). This was intended primarily to help encapsulate the various provinces or proto-kingdoms or whatever we want to call them which show up in ancient Chinese chronicles prior to the centralization and pseudo-unification of the Yamato, Nara, and Heian periods, e.g. Nakoku, Tsushima Province ... I suppose, if we translate 国 as "province" and not as "country", that makes them part of the Yamato state and thus renders this category unnecessary... Sorry for not fully thinking this through before I did it.

Nevertheless, assuming we do categorize these various things (and other things like the Republic of Ezo and the short-lived 12th century Kingdom of Hiraizumi which I have yet to flesh out an article for) under "Former countries in Japanese history", the question arises of how to deal with certain other subjects, such as Japan's 20th century colonies. Is Empire of Japan a "former country in Japanese history"? Do Korea under Japanese rule or Occupied Japan fall into this category?

Thoughts and suggestions would be most appreciated. Thanks. LordAmeth 20:43, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. I think Occupied Japan and Empire of Japan probably fall under the scope of the category, since the form of government was different, but I don't think there's really a correct answer here. I'm thinking that Nanboku-chō should be added into the category as well. Dekimasuよ! 00:18, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your reply and suggestions. I've added Northern Court to the category, as I think it fits the definition of a country or at least a government better than Nanboku, being a time period, does. As for Occupied Japan and Empire of Japan, I'm going to leave them out for now, as they were not separate from the core of the Japanese polity. I think you're absolutely right to say that there probably isn't a correct answer for this - if we consider the Yamato state to be a state, and the Tokugawa state(s) to likewise be a nation, are these "former countries in Japanese history" or just former incarnations of the same Japan? The whole thing is only complicated further by the ambiguous meaning of 国, and threads of scholarship over the last several decades which talk about the semi-independent nature of the Tokugawa domains (han). ... Anyway, thanks again. Whatever happens with this, I'm glad to have a category, and I'm not too worried about which side of the fence we may end up on with these issues. LordAmeth 10:58, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Iwatsu Electric and other Japanese electronics companies

The article Iwatsu Electric is just a stub, and some other articles listed in {{Japanese Electronics Industry}} are either stubs or missing. If you are interested in electronics manufacturing companies, you may want to expand some of these articles. In the case of missing articles, administrators may wish to review any previously deleted articles which may serve as a starting point for a new article. --Eastmain 02:22, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

User:One2one created several such stubs for the template and at least one has already had a speedy-deletion tag added, stating that it has no claim of notability (I think a billion dollars in sales is a claim of notability, so I removed it). All the red links in the template were created and deleted. So I second User:Eastmain's plea to beef these up. Fg2 06:58, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
Apparently the ones that were actually deleted were speedied for being empty, which seems valid (but creation would be good). Dekimasuよ! 09:02, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
I am oblidged to reluctantly advertise myself here for being a good advertisement writer with this example: Iwatsu Electric. Could anyone kindly advise me how it can be improved please? Would immitating the style as seen in Redback Networks or Vecima networks help? Thank you in advance. --OhMyDeer 03:22, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

New disambiguation section

Sorry to pull Chiba right off the list like that. I did have a reason for it beyond simply that I've been working on the links. I usually consider myself the only one doing disambiguation on the Japan-related articles (I've probably done 2000 links to the page "Japanese" by now), and I do the straightforward links first, leaving behind the ones that have serious problems to ponder at the end. These are things like Republic of Eastern Turkestan and Axis Powers Links (linked to Japanese), Koshiró Oikawa (linked to Japanese Navy), or in a very different vein, Japanese pens and stationery. Or Opposition at home to the Japanese government (WWII), with its cleanup tag from October 2005. I lose my list of articles in serious need of cleanup/moving/a deletion discussion if another editor fixes those links. I know it's selfish, but for that reason, if you want to do dab link repair, please consider starting with the DPM pages and avoid Chiba for the moment.

My weeding is most evident if you check "what links here" for Japanese. The weeding has caused most articles that remain linked to have very serious flaws. Unfortunately, fixing them is not something I can keep up with, and there is a backup of about 70 pages like that. Rather than just fix the links to Japanese, please, please jump in and fix a few of the articles themselves. Dekimasuよ! 10:19, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Japanese Baseball

Hey everyone. Just thought I'd inform you there is a new Japanese Baseball task force at the Baseball-WikiProject.--Borgardetalk 11:50, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks. I added our project banner there, too, as we fully support that task force. Thanks for creating it. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 22:07, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the support, we're still trying to kick it off. I have a bit of knowledge of Japanese baseball, but not as much as I'd like as I don't live there and the information really isn't that readily available on the net. If anyone has anything, please post it resources :) --Borgardetalk 12:10, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Peer review update

Peer review of Japanese invasions of Korea (1592-1598) ended with no comments.

Peer review of Nick Baker (prisoner in Japan) has been underway for two weeks with no comments.

Fg2 05:03, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Maiko/Geiko List

There is currently no precedent to have or maintain a complete list of the active maiko/geiko in a particular district, not even the Kamishichiken page in Japanese. They only go as far as to list some of the more common geisha lines of descent, like Ume-, Katsu-, Nao- Ichi-, etc. Since the information is hard enough to verify, let alone update constantly, would you recommend leaving the page as it is, or changing it to reflect such limits (as per Wikipedia:Verifiability:Sources in languages other than English)? Claw789 22:46, 12 April 2007 (UTC)

Key Party Records

I've copied some of this info from the article in Wikipedia: Japan and I'd like to have someone check the translation for me. Also, I need some references from Japanese music magazines, etc. to help out. All the online references to Visual kei history and background seem too commercial to satisfy the Wikipedia editors. Pkeets 17:29, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

In the spirit of getting more FA completed

I've created a new section on the main project page called Top importance articles → FA. The goal of this section is to help us organize to get our Top importance articles up to featured status. There are quite a few that are pretty close (B-Class or higher), so I think with some good cooperation we can reach and exceed the goal listed on the main page for 40 Featured Articles by the end of the year. I think it will also help balance out the list as the majority of current FA in the list are military articles (not that there's anything wrong with that, but a balance is good). So, please dive in and add your name next to any article which interest you.

On a side note, I'm really amazed and happy with how this project has organized and come together to improve Japan-related articles on the wiki. I think we have all made a positive impact since the project was organized a little over one year ago. I look forward to working with all of you for many years to come as we continue to make a possitive impact here. Thanks for all of your hard work! ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:46, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Does anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about this? ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:52, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Having tried to get the Collaboration of the Week going over the past couple of years, and seeing how it hasn't worked, I've concluded that group cooperation doesn't get articles featured, or even improved. Instead, in looking at WP:FAC, I see that featured articles often come from a single author, or maybe two people with a common interest. The successful articles don't always go through Peer Review, but PR can be helpful. Likewise GA. Also, while an article is a candidate for Featured Article status, the author has to be very active in editing the article to answer objections. There are exceptions to the one-article, one-author pattern, of course, but I'd say if someone wants to get an article featured, the best thing to do is read FAC a lot, look at the nits they pick and edit the article to avoid them, get reliable sources for every statement that could be challenged, and be prepared to devote a lot of time to the article during featured-article candidacy. Fg2 20:57, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Policy on dissolved municipalities/districts

I've been working to add geodata to articles for all current municipalities in Japan, with the goal of having them show up in the Wikipedia layer on Google Earth. I've finished all of Shikoku and some of Kyushu so far.

I'm encountering an issue that I was hoping we could discuss, if there aren't already guidelines for it: Should former (dissolved) municipalities have geodata?

As I've been adding geodata to current municipalities, I've been removing it from dissolved municipalities.

However, there is a bot, The Anomebot2, that goes around adding geodata to articles and, despite my entreaties, continues to do so to articles for dissolved municipalities kind of unintentionally. What I mean by that is, the owner of the bot disabled direct support for Japanese locations (due to lots of namespace collision errors), but it seems to be pulling "known good" geodata from the Spanish Wikipedia, which happens to have data for dissolved municipalities.

My stance is that dissolved municipalities should not have geodata

  • Dissolved municipalities no longer exist
  • Most such places weren't all that notable to begin with, and their articles usually have no more than the bare minimum facts (location, population, etc.)
  • Visualization services (like Google Earth) really shouldn't be showing us places that no longer exist. Some might say that it's their job to sort out what's "mapworthy," but I think that's a lazy solution that will simply result in crappy maps.

What are your thoughts? Amake 00:15, 16 April 2007 (UTC)

I agree with this stance whole-heartedly. The wikipedia layer of Google Earth ought to act like a current map of the world. Currently, dissolved municipalities don't exist! Though I have a question: does simply adding coordinates equate to adding the page to Google Earth? If so, then I have been contributing to the problem by adding coordinates to dissolved municipalities. Ideally, I would like to be able to have coordinates without having the wikipedia page show up on Google Earth. BilabialBoxing 00:56, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, any page with a variation of the coor template will get picked up by Google Earth. For some reason such coords listed in an infobox will not get picked up (probably an oversight). This isn't automatic, though—Google needs to periodically re-sync their database with Wikipedia. This seems to happen once every couple months. Amake 04:12, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
While they may not be a separate municipality, pretty much every former municipality in Japan becomes a sub-section of the new municipality, so I think geo data is acceptable on the former municipality articles. All it does is tell you where it is, so I don't see the harm. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 06:26, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
The only "harm" is that visualization services will be cluttered with lots of places that were hardly notable to begin with, and now they're just neighborhoods--we don't even have articles on neighborhoods in other countries, much less geodata. It's just a lot of useless info. In fact I'd be for deleting the dissolved towns' articles entirely (except for places that can be argued to be notable, of course). Amake 06:41, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Despite having created a template specifically for dissolved municipalities, I'm actually leaning towards deletion as well. So many existing municipalities have so little information in them. I think it's better to flesh those out and include the salient information about the former municipalities within them. BilabialBoxing 06:53, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
I would oppose deleting articles on dissolved municipalities. There's interesting history in them. Fg2 07:50, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
That's pretty rare. And when that is the case, that info can be moved to the current municipality's article. Amake 08:02, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Indent reset
We just had a similar discussion at Talk:List of mergers and dissolutions of municipalities in Japan. In principle, I agree with Fg2; in practice, I think we may be waiting an awfully long time for most of those articles to have anything interesting added. One compromise seems to be creating redirects from dissolved places, to the current place. The redirects can be categorized, etc; and, can be resurrected (or created) with useful info at any later date.
I also agree with Nihonjoe that the geo info about regions in a (now) larger city are beneficial. In the discussion above, I mentioned a table format I swiped from ja: and implemented on Izumi-ku, Sendai to keep track of mergers back to Meiji. If the left-most sides of that table were geo-tagged, would that cause trouble for GoogleEarth? An article could have one set of coords for its current location, and then (contained in the table; or some other place) more coords for the places it integrated. Neier 11:27, 16 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello! I'm the operator of User:The Anomebot2. I've just found this discussion during a Google search. Whilst I'm very interested in helping to add geodata for Japanese locations, it looks like there's a consensus here that the bot should not add Japanese geolocations from other Wikipedias for the time being. I've now set up a geographical mask to exclude locations in Japan from the next interwiki geodata runs.
As a commenter above says, I've turned off the addition of geolocations from the GNS database for Japanese locations for the time being, since it looks like the combination of Japanese place-naming conventions and multiple incompatible transliteration standards generates enough inconsistency to defeat all my efforts at accurately matching the GNS data to Wikipedia articles and category paths. If anyone has any good ideas at how I might match Wikipedia article names with Japanese placenames in the GNS, I'd be very pleased to hear from you. -- The Anome 17:22, 18 April 2007 (UTC)
Thank you! Amake 23:29, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

A sample of a new dataset

I've been reworking my GNS data-matching code to attempt to deal with the special case of Japanese locations, and I've also added code to the bot to skip locations marked as "dissolved" when editing articles -- it will also spot already-tagged locations, redirects, disambiguation pages and other special cases, and skip these as well.

I've put a sample of the new computed locations below: could you please let me know if there are any inaccuracies in this sample? (Please note that these values are in decimal degrees, not degrees-minutes-and-seconds.) -- The Anome 00:00, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for soliciting our views. I checked the first five, and, as far as accuracy goes, it is much better than a few months ago. It looks like your database would be gathering town office locations, because, each of the five were close by. One looked strange (it was in the ocean), but, for coastal locations, I think that's something we'll have to live with. Another was for a dissolved town; but, it had not been marked as such. Personally, I have no problem with the bot tagging old locations. If we keep the articles around, they should be tagged. If we redirect the articles, then, the "extra" geo-tags can be dealt with then. Neier 00:38, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I checked the two Saga Prefecture ones (being the area I am familiar with). The new Arita, Saga coords are near the east branch of the town office, while the old coords are spot on the main branch. The new Ōmachi, Saga coords are about the same amount of off as the old coords, but in a different direction (from the town office). In both cases though both sets of coords are, you know, within the city limits. The only problem I see with replacing English article coords with coords gotten from the Japanese articles (which is what I think is going on) is cases like Arita, where someone has clearly gone through the trouble to be spot on and the Japanese ones are a bit off. BilabialBoxing 03:21, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Is there any policy or consensus on where we should be pointing at with the geodata? Should it be the highest government building of the region? Should it be the center of the region? In the first case, do we need full dms precision? If it's the latter we should be rounding, but to what? The nearest minute? Amake 11:59, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
The locations below are taken from the U.S. government's public domain GEOnet Names Server data, cross-correlated with the Wikipedia article information.

Portal:Japan

I think this portal is very close to featured standard. Can you guys comment on what should be improved? Like.. Include a nomination section for Selected article and Selected pictures? AQu01rius (User • Talk) 03:50, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

By the way, can someone direct me to a list of featured Japan-related pictures? AQu01rius (User • Talk) 03:55, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Geez, I hadn't realized before that Category:Wikipedia featured pictures isn't sub-categorized by country, only by History; Culture and Arts; People; Places etc. That's no good... LordAmeth 09:44, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
I just created Category:Featured Japan-related pictures. Feel free to add appropriate pics to it. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 23:07, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Geotags in ja: Wikipedia

Aha! I've found what appears to be some geodata in a Japanese article: it was hiding in plain sight in the ja:有田町 article as "東経129度53分 北緯33度10分", which I take to mean 33°10′N, 129°53′E. Presumably "度" means "degrees", and "分" means "minutes of arc", and Google translate tells me that "東" means "East" and "北" means "North", "南" means "South" and "西" "West", so "経" must presumably mean "longitude" and "緯" "latitude". Thus presumably the standard Japanese format is something like "<east|west><longitude>xx<degrees>yy<minutes> <north|south><latitude>uu<degrees>vv<minutes>"

Googling a bit [3] finds things like "北緯35度41分11.0秒 東経139度46分17.2秒": does this mean that "秒" means "seconds of arc"? Also, I note that the latitude and longitude are in the reverse order to the previous example: are both formats regarded as equally valid?

Can anyone tell me if I've got this right? In addition, does anyone know if there might be any geodata encoded in the ja: Wikipedia using Japanese numerals?

I've also noticed that some templates, like that used at ja:ニューヨーク, generated geotags that pointed to the old and broken

http://kvaleberg.com/extensions/mapsources/index.php?params= ...

URL: they should be changed to point to the new

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params= ...

URL to make the page link to the new geolocation pages. Update: I've now edited those templates, and fixed this. -- The Anome 13:28, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Yep, you got all that right. And there shouldn't be any geodata in Japanese numerals.
Japanese English
度 degree
分 minute
秒 second
北 North
東 East
南 South
西 West
経(度) longitude
緯(度) latitude
Amake 13:50, 19 April 2007 (UTC)

Categories for Rōjū and other shogunal officials

As I've created articles for two Rōjū (senior shogunal advisors under the Tokugawa) recently, and may be doing more in the future, I am contemplating creating a category for them. Currently, all are either categorized as simply "daimyo" or as "Japanese politicians" as well. This presents a problem as (a) there were a great many daimyo in the Edo period, and I think roju and others who held important positions within the central government should be distinguished somehow, and (b) I don't like the idea of lumping these figures into the same category as modern-style politicians. In the time of the Rōjū, there were no Ministries, no Diet, no Members of Parliament, and no suit & necktie. It's arguable that there didn't even exist a nation-state of "Japan" until 1868 for them to be politicians of.

Thus, I propose to create either:

  1. a separate category for Roju and Tairo, the top-most advisors to the Shogunate (~15 current articles, another 50 or so redlinks)
    • Pro: Well-defined, contains a closed set of potential articles, restricted to the topmost important advisors
    • Con: Cuts out some important figures such as Arai Hakuseki, Ogyu Sorai, and Hayashi Razan who never held those posts.
  2. a more general category of "shogunal advisors", which would incorporate those listed above who were not roju/tairo.
    • Should this be "Advisors to the Tokugawa shogunate" or something to the effect, or should it be allowed to incorporate the earlier shogunates as well?
  3. an even more general category of "shogunal officials" or something similarly worded, to encompass all those who were not simply daimyo but who served the central government in some significant capacity.
    • Pro: It may be a good idea to distinguish these figures who played a role in the central government, as many would otherwise be categorized simply as daimyo, or even only as samurai, with nothing in their categorization to distinguish them any further.
    • Con: This is the least well-defined, most inclusive of the options, and could get out of hand once we start adding in other shogunates, and questioning what types of posts are significant enough to count as "shogunal officials" - the chief magistrate in Nagasaki may count, but would other local officers (e.g. metsuke) count?

Thanks for considering my questions. I look forward to suggestions and thoughts. LordAmeth 10:48, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

It may be good to have something like "Shogunal government officials" which would contain categories for Daimyo, Rōjū, Samurai, and Tairo. Anyone who wasn't one of those four would be in the main category. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:56, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Because it's a pain to recategorize and delete old categories, it's best to be cautious before naming the categories. I'd hesitate to put daimyo generally in a category named "shogunal government officials," although of course those few daimyo who were roju would fit nicely there. Ditto samurai. In fact not even hatamoto generally; for governmental officials, holders of high official posts in the government or administration should be the criterion. Most hatamoto would not qualify (although most who merit articles would). Roju, wakadoshiyori are examples of high posts in the shogunal government/administration. Bugyo is sometimes a high post, sometimes low: the word is not an automatic qualification. Kanjo bugyo, jisha bugyo are high posts; Edo machi bugyo, Osaka machi bugyo are examples that are fairly high in the administration but around the level where we might want to start debating whether to include or not. Kyoto shoshidai, yes. Possibly our criteria would include daikan, metsuke; possibly we would exclude them. I would not include temporary appointees like Asano Naganori, whose appointment was for a particular ceremony; that and similar appointments were not part of routine administration. I hope this is a step toward specific criteria for inclusion in the category "shogunal governmental officials" (or "officials of the Tokugawa shogunate" or similar). The category could list posts to include and those not to include, and as we think of more we could discuss them, if we choose to go this route.
Advisers is difficult, because the shogunates were ad-hoc about it. Religious leaders such as Tenkai, Confucian scholars, onmyoji, Tsunayoshi's own mother, the Dutch, it's a mixed bag. We need some criteria or else everyone who finds a single passing mention of a person who put a letter in the meyasubako or stopped a roju in the street to present a petition will add pet articles to the category.

Fg2 21:00, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your thorough response. It is exactly the uncertainties you mention that I saw as being a potential problem and thus asked for ideas, thoughts and responses before being bold and doing the categorization unilaterally. I do wonder, though, assuming we were to set some rough (or more solid) standards for what does and doesn't go in the category, do you think it's a good idea to create categories, or to leave it as is? We could be fairly strict about what "shogunate officials" constitutes - roju, tairo, wakadoshiyori, but not bugyo, for example. And we could create a separate "shogunal advisors" category for the likes of Sorai, Hakuseki, Razan, and William Adams. Or we could forget about it entirely. I just hate to see so many figures lumped together into a general "daimyo" or "samurai" category as if their role in the central government wasn't relevant. LordAmeth 21:35, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
I like the idea of categories with pretty clear criteria for inclusion, e.g. Officials of the Tokugawa shogunate (roju, wakadoshiyori, and a few others, and their predecessors before the titles became regularized). Advisers, that's a more difficult one. I'm not sure if my concern is valid, or if it'll turn out that so few insignificant people actually have articles that it's not worth worrying about. Maybe the key point is that if we name the category Advisers to Tokugawa shoguns we limit inclusion to people who directly (personally) advised a shogun, rather than a shogunate. Maybe that's restrictive enough to let the important ones in, and keep out the minor figures? Fg2 07:53, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
Sounds good. I like that idea. LordAmeth 08:36, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

Okay. I've created Category:Rōjū as a subcat of Category:Officials of the Tokugawa shogunate; I'll likely create and populate other related categories tomorrow. If you'd like to, take a look at what cats the "Officials" category is in, and make what changes you think appropriate. Also, should Category:Tokugawa shoguns be a subcat of this, or are they above "officials"? Thanks. LordAmeth 01:04, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

I'd put the shoguns above officials. It might be worth putting a line of text in the category saying these are major officials who served under the shoguns. Also a line to state that people are categorized by highest office held, not by all offices en route to their highest. Would you agree?
Not sure how the subcategories will play out... If I were doing it I'd probably combine tairo and roju. But having separate categories is probably at least probably harmless, and may be beneficial, so it might work out better as you did it.
Thanks for doing these! Fg2 07:47, 25 April 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, I was actually going to ask your thoughts about that - highest office held, and combining roju/tairo. For now, I'll make Tairo a subcat of roju, since all Tairo were roju as well. I'm also keeping "daimyo" a separate category, double-categorizing all of these people by both "daimyo" and by their rank within the shogunate. As there were bureaucrats at various levels (incl some roju or tairo I think) who were not daimyo, and as daimyo is sort of a separate role, in the han part of bakuhan, I think it appropriate to keep it separate from the categorization we're doing of the baku part. We'll just have to see how it plays out. LordAmeth 10:37, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

Proposed geotagging of articles

I'd like to go ahead with an Anomebot2 run to insert about 400 location tags into Japanese place articles. This would use the computer-generated dataset from which I've posted a sample above, which seems to be reasonably accurate after spot-checking by other editors. Since the earlier discussion, I've modified the bot not to tag any article placed in one of the dissolved municipality or district categories. Would it be OK with the community here if I was to start tagging these articles? -- The Anome 22:00, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 22:08, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
You have my support too. Neier 22:50, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Please do. Amake 02:19, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks! I've done so. -- The Anome 23:34, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Proposed geotagging of district articles

After the successful geotagging of around 400 town/city/village articles, I've got another computer-generated dataset, this time for districts ("-gun"). This uses some slightly more awkward heuristics than before, because the GNS data does not have prefecture or sub-prefecture relationships encoded, so I've worked on the principle of this being the only "X-gun" of this name in the GNS, and the only "X District" listed in any of Wikipedia's articles. If anyone would like to spot-check a few entries of the small sample below, and if it looks plausible, I'd like to set the bot off again: this run will only tag about 140 articles, but every little helps.

-- The Anome 23:34, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

Checked the first five. They are all within the boundries of the districts except for Mihara District which no longer exists. The tricky thing about districts is that they have no identifiable center (except for a proper geographical one of course), and often times they consists of only one town, so their borders are literally exactly the same as the one town they encompass. BilabialBoxing 05:10, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
I randomly checked two in the north half, and the results aren't as good as for the cities. Neier 07:00, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the feedback! I'll have to revisit this later, when I have better data. -- The Anome 09:49, 25 April 2007 (UTC)

New useful tool for unusual place names

I'm almost done transliterating Place names with unusual readings from the Japanese Wiki. I created it as a subpage of WPJ because I wasn't sure how good it would be as a regular article. I've concentrated on getting the examples translated and left the top of the Japanese page mostly untranslated. If anyone wishes to help with translating the top part of the Japanese page, I would be extremely grateful. I'll finish up the last section on the page within the next few days. Please let me know what you think of the page. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 19:38, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your hard work on this. I'm not sure just yet what I think about this in terms of its usefulness, and I do fear that if it's brought into article space, it may get slapped with AfD. But it is very interesting. I'll see if I can take a stab at translating some of it. LordAmeth 21:00, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I thought it might be useful when translating locations or addresses that included these locations when those locations didn't have articles themselves. Most of the locations in that article are small areas in a town, ward, or city, so they are much less likely to have an article themselves. And, since they are unusually named, people may have a hard time correctly translating the name. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 21:06, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
Well, I've taken a stab at translating that whole introduction section about why unusual place names emerge. You are more than welcome to play with my formatting, or to add or remove examples (there's a whole list in the Japanese versions of alternate readings for characters which I left out here as not being easily accessible or interesting to the average reader, e.g. that the do of Edo can also be read as be or he in other placenames). I think I did a fairly decent job with the translation (I'm really still pretty intermediate in my skills), but if you, or someone else, wouldn't mind looking it over, I'd appreciate it. Particularly the very first one or two sentences - I have a lot of trouble with multiple negatives strung throughout a single long sentence. Thanks a lot. LordAmeth 22:39, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

Well, all the location names have been translated now, and LordAmeth (as he indicated above) has translated a good portion of the header from the ja:wiki page. Hopefully the page will be useful for the reasons given above. ···日本穣? · Talk to Nihonjoe 17:11, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

Daishi

Daishi has been prodded, and it's not a great article, but if it can't be turned into a dab, or improved to be an article, it will get turned into a redirect to Daishi (BattleMech), which I think is somewhat inappropriate. 132.205.44.134 22:32, 26 April 2007 (UTC)