 Hi everyone, I'm Kitamura Sae, a Japanese researcher of Shakespeare and feminist literary criticism. Today I would like to talk and discuss the rise of conspiracy theories in the Japanese Wikipedia in my presentation. Come on, it's Wikipedia, not Westeros, a brief introduction to the Wikipedia conspiracy theory in Japan. For some of you, this title might bring to mind bad Wikipedia articles full of conspiracy theories, but that is not what I am going to talk about today. What I will be discussing are conspiracy theories about Wikipedia, such as Wikipedia is controlled by Yuno Fu. As a teacher, I have incorporated the translation of Wikipedia entries into my university classes. If you are interested in my class, please see Wikipedia 15's article indicated on the slide. This is the article. I also participated in the launch of Art and Feminism and Wikigap for the Japanese Wikipedia, and I have attended various Wikipedia events for newcomers in Japan. Through these experiences, I have found that some non-Wikipedia believe that Wikipedia is a place like Westeros in the Game of Thrones, a very, very dark place run by visorily motivated and anonymous geeks, where a lot of backstabbing is going on. Perhaps we should admit this observation contains some truth, especially the part about visorily motivated geeks, but in fact, I would say that Wikipedia is rather stupid than fearful or corrupt. As the saying goes, never attribute malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The Japanese Wikipedia has been criticized for its low quality and bias which have long been recognized by Wikipedians in Japan. All recent concern in our community, however, is the rise of a conspiracy theory, propagated mostly by non-Wikipedia, which believes, who believes that the Japanese Wikipedia is controlled by a small number of biased administrators, despite more examples of this claim being unfounded and driven by misunderstandings of Wikipedia's complex system. Today, I'm going to focus on two prominent examples relating to this theory, the Higashi Ikebukuro Ranaika accident and Sato Yumiko's criticism of historical negationism. Claims arguing their manipulations or conspiracies on Wikipedia have always been around, but the Wikipedia entry about the Higashi Ikebukuro Ranaika accident triggered one of the most negative reactions throughout the Japanese Wikipedia. On the 19 April 2019, a car run by Iizuka Kozo, an 87-year-old ex-director of the agency of industrial science and technology, ignored the traffic light and caused a serious accident in Higashi Ikebukuro, a busy area in Tokyo. The accident involved over 10 people and killed their mother and her three-year-old daughter. It soon became a cold celeb partly because the driver, Iizuka, was not arrested despite the seriousness of the accident, which he attributed to technical problems of his Toyota. Publicly, the reason he was not arrested was that he was also severely injured and hospitalized, but many people suspected that Iizuka received special treatment because he had been a high-ranking technocrat with a strong connection to the government. On 20 April, the entry about Iizuka was published in the Japanese Wikipedia, but his notability was first questioned. After his notability as a researcher and technocrat was established, which provoked an intense discussion on the talk page about whether or not the accident should be explicitly mentioned in the article. On 24 April, the entry of the accident was also uploaded and incited a similar response. Following the discussion, the Japanese Wikipedia community decided to avoid linking Iizuka's name to the accident, and since then, Iizuka's entry has only contained information about his career prior to the accident. I personally think this accident should be mentioned in his entry, and the English-language entry about the Iigashi Ikebukuro-Nameka accident does reveal his name. Okay, this is the Japanese version of his page, and it doesn't mention the accident. And this is the article about the accident itself, and it doesn't mention his name, but in the English version of the accident, the English article about the accident writes his name, oh, yes, Pozo Iizuka, and also the, sorry, oh, there is also the article about himself in the English version, and it also mentions the accident. Okay. However, I know that the Japanese Wikipedia has adopted a very cautious attitude toward privacy, deformation, copyright violation, and other legal disputes, and that many Japanese Wikipedians prefer to avoid mentioning accidents or other legal troubles caused by notable living people if these incidents are not directly related to their careers. That's partly because we don't have any chapters in Japan, so it's quite difficult to respond to the legal troubles if we face it. So in fact, there are several other biographical entries which deliberately omit accidents or scandals that could be mentioned as examples to illustrate how local customs influence decisions such as not including the driver's identity in either Iizuka's or the accident's entries. Non-Wikipedia, however, did not know these general unwritten rules, and as the result of an editable, Iizuka's entry on the Japanese Wikipedia soon came under full protection, meaning it could be edited by anyone except, it could not be edited by anyone except an administrator, and has since been placed under extended confirmable protection. The Japanese Wikipedia was claritized for protecting the entry and for not mentioning Iizuka's involvement in the accident, and there was a rumor that it banned users from writing about the accident in Iizuka's entry after receiving a considerable amount of money from Iizuka himself. This rumor sounds completely ridiculous to those who know how Wikipedia's donation system works, but it was so widely circulated that the Japanese talk page of the Iizuka Kozo's entry has frequently asked questions sections explaining that editors of the Japanese Wikipedia do not know of the details of the donation received by the Wikimedia Foundation, and the donations in general do not influence entries at all. This is a discussion, a talk page of Iizuka Kozo, and it's expressed many things about how this article works. Despite this clarification in the discussion page, some people still believe this rumor is true. It is one of the prominent examples of the Wikipedia conspiracy theory in Japan. Let's move on to the second example, Sato Yamiko's historical negationism claims. Sato Yamiko, a musical therapist, started actively criticizing the Japanese Wikipedia of historical negationism in January 2021, beginning with a viral post on her weblog with the Japanese summary of her academic presentation in Interaction 21, a conference focusing on user experience design. This is the Sato's first blog post about the negationism of the Japanese Wikipedia. According to Sato, historical negationism is rampant in the Japanese Wikipedia and politically controversial entries about Japan's war crimes, such as Comfort Woman, Lanking Incident, and Unit 731 are distorted. In this case, I agree that these entries influenced by the worst kind of historical negationism trying to downplay Japan's war crimes. As a feminist, I'm not at all comfortable with this kind of poor quality and negationism in the Japanese Wikipedia articles on war crimes. Sato, however, does not understand Wikipedia the system when her first blog post contained various misconceptions about Japanese Wikipedia in particular. When she wrote her first post, she had edited Wikipedia only three times and all her edits lacked references or footnotes, which are required in controversial entries and led to all her edits being reverted. She did not know the differences between full protection and semi-protection and the thoughts that only administrators could edit the Japanese entry about the Nanking Incident, even though it was only semi-protected. She also misunderstood the numbers of administrators working for the Japanese Wikipedia as part of her argument. The greatest misunderstanding is Sato's claim that administrators of the Japanese Wikipedia are controlling Wikipedia, likening it to the Croatian Wikipedia. This widely misses the point and starts to sound like a conspiracy theory that the Croatian Wikipedia is notorious for the administrators who abuse their technical abilities over its approximately 210,000 entries. Although Sato did not mention the Scott's Wikipedia, it was also vandalized by one administrator who could not understand the Scott's and has about 40,000 entries. Compared to the Croatian Wikipedia, which has 210,000 entries and the Scott's Wikipedia with about 40,000 entries, the Japanese Wikipedia is much larger than these others with 1,280,000 entries. Unlike the Croatian and the Scott's Wikipedia, it is difficult for a small number of administrators to control such a large community as the one in Japan. There are many politically-motivated editors in the Japanese Wikipedia and in 2017, our 17 right-wing accounts, including suspected sockpuppets, were blocked for the abuses, which suggests that also our community has tried to avoid obviously biased edits. In many cases, it has been unsuccessful, but we are trying. The Japanese Wikipedia has only 40 administrators, none of whom were linked to these right-wing accounts, and is far from being controlled by a small number of administrators as Sato in correctly outaged in her blog post. But instead, the Japanese Wikipedia suffers from a serious shortage of administrators, which makes it feel more like a mess rather than a controlled disappear. Actually, we live in a kind of mess in the Japanese Wikipedia. I discussed these points in the comments section of Sato's blog, but my comment was deleted. So, I uploaded an entry in my own weblog, which was ignored by Sato. This is my blog, and this is the entry about Sato's article. Sato has continued writing on Slate and Underc magazine. This is Sato's article on Slate, and this is also Sato's article on Underc magazine. Sato has continued writing on Slate and Underc magazines, correcting several of her previous statements, but repeating some of the analysis based on the lack of misunderstanding of Wikipedia's community and system, or lack of understandings of Wikipedia's community and system. Although we share the same awareness of the issue, I think that Sato fails to address it properly because she does not know the basic rules for editing entries. The problem about this Wikipedia is controlled by UFO theories is that it triggers personal attacks on individual administrators and users. Although I am not an administrator, I have received several inappropriate letters about Wikipedia in my office at the university, in addition to various online attacks, perhaps partly because I am a feminist and wikipedia. In Izuko Koso's case, the personal talk page of one of the administrators who protected the article was vandalized with an unfounded claim to suggest that the administrator is Izuko himself. After Sato's web entry went viral, similar attacks on administrators have taken place. Sato mentioned two administrators by name on Wikipedia, suggesting that they give historical negation its cover, but in my opinion, she names two administrators in this page, but in my opinion, these two administrators did nothing wrong and were simply following the community rules about edit rules. These attacks can also have a negative effect on the number of administrators, which is very small, and I am worried that fewer and fewer wikipedia will run for administrators out of fear of being personally attacked. I have pointed out that Japanese Wikipedia is suffering from a serious shortage of administrators, furthermore, we need more good editors. In my view, including the number of motivated wikipedia with the right commitment is the only solution to resolve the problems of poor quality and historical negation and inaccuracies in the Japanese Wikipedia. And to invite competent administrators and editors, we must create a space free from online attacks and bullying. I personally hope that more professional scholars, particularly academic historical societies in Japan, will become involved in Wikipedia to improve historical entries and reduce the bad influence of historical negationism. To achieve this goal, I organized the Western History Wikipedia workshop at the 71st annual meeting of the Japanese Society of Western History on 16 May 2021 and taught a group of historians how to edit Wikipedia entries. I secretly dream that Japanese historical societies will hold big anti-negationism Wikipedia editors on some day in the future, but I do not think that it will happen because it may cause full-on editorials between historians and negationists like this photo. This is my favorite photo in the English Wikipedia page, the lamest editorial page, and so I am just dreaming. To make Japanese Wikipedia a better place, we must work together one step at a time to ensure transparency, historical accuracy and inclusivity and safety for administrators and other wikipedians. Thank you very much for listening. Any questions? Yes, I think I have received some questions. Oh, sorry, I'm just looking for the questions. Oh, okay. So if you don't have any questions for now, please contact me, but if you're interested, please email me to this site at sciencecc.musasi.ac.jp. If you are interested in the Japanese Wikipedia and its system, please email me. So thank you very much for listening.