User blog:JoshuaJSlone/Introducing Hello! Project Wiki Japanese

So hey guys, here is a semi-secret project I've been working on recently: ハロー!プロジェクト Wiki.

As far back as last year when we were just getting connected to the other-language H!P wikis on Wikia, I was surprised that Japanese was not one of the seven languages someone had decided to start an H!P wiki in. I recently decided to do something about that. Now, my Japanese skills are preeeeeeetty low level. But I had a few things in mind:
 * Proper Japanese speakers with an interest in H!P are more likely to add to an existing wiki than to start one from scratch, so having something in existence might catch the right peoples' attention.
 * Our pages already contain a lot of Japanese content. You could almost have a half-decent Japanese page just by cutting away the English.
 * Even just a translated infobox would be a good-looking start for a stub page.

Well, I did not do EXACTLY that, but close enough. Using J Wikipedia and Google Translate, I found replacement wording for CD Infobox and page sections. Copied over infobox data with some changed formatting. Copied discography links, and copied the Japanese tracklists from those pages. Not as full as our English pages, and there's no prose, but also less to screw up on before finishing a half decent version of the page that can always be improved later.

As I added pages and categories interlanguage links were added to this site, and occasionally I've had Robo Kiss add the links here going in the other direction.

Even the Hello! Project Birthdays thing on the front page is there. You may remember that when I updated it a few weeks back I talked about how it would be easier to copy to other wikis, even ones that would use the kanji names. Well, here it is.

At this point I'm pretty happy with what I've accomplished, though it's still very limited. Except for some of their collaborative works I've got the entire single and album history of Minimoni and S/mileage, plus rudimentary group pages to link to them. However; there are no member, photobook, concert, or other pages to name a few. Still, it's already got more pages than the Chinese, French, or German H!P wikis. You're next, Spanish!

As I said earlier, a goal was to make something other, better Japanese editors might latch onto rather than intending it as a quest to mirror this entire wiki. So at this point I think it mostly gets put on the backburner.

If you haven't read enough about this yet, I also put up a blog post over there about some of the decisions I made, mostly regarding localization and design.