An American Teaching in Asia Reports on Why Japan Loves Wikis

Wikipedia Japan

I’m excited to be able to share insights with you today from an itinerant English teacher on the topic of Japanese interest in wikis.  Hopefully you will remember this topic from last week’s discoveries here and here.

The author has been in Asia for several years as a professional English teacher, first working in Japan and recently relocating to a prestigious new post in Hong Kong.  I’ve bolded some of the parts that I found most interesting and I will offer a bit of a response at the end.

I really don’t know exactly why the Japanese love “wiki” so much. The only thing I could even think of is the nature of the Japanese-language Web. Even now, most Japanese portals (and web pages for that matter) are basically link pages – there is surprisingly little multimedia content. That’s possibly because the majority of Japanese don’t actually browse the Internet on PCs.. most regularly browse the Web on their mobile phones, which are far more advanced than anything in the rest of the world (mainly because the network is different, and the manufacturers only produce phones for Japan). Therefore, Japanese websites are traditionally image-light, and have lots of links. I would guess that’s why they like wikis so much; it appeals to their sense of what’s “right” about an Internet site.

Another thing might be the Japanese traditional spirit of collaboration in work and research. Most work in Japan is done as a team, with little or no individual recognition (at least in the business and technology fields). This may be why wikis (which I believe are traditionally a collaborative collective of information) might appeal to them as well.

Of course, that could be a bunch of BS, it’s just what sprang to mind.  (I snipped some personal stuff here at the end.  -Daniel)

Good luck in your research.

~Casey

These insights are quite welcome and instructional in their implications on collaboration communities.  The “mobile browsing favors low-fi web content” idea is very similar to something I deal with at work – our IT policies restrict viewing of most streaming multimedia like YouTube or CNN Video.  Because I work under that mindset 40 hours a week I’ll rarely think to visit rich media sites even when outside the office.

Continued Rise of the Handheld
This is a great example of the idea that different user types will have different preferred methods to access your content.  Think about the reports that iPhone users are twelve times more likely than regular phone users to browse social networking sites and then remember that the first smart phones on the Google Android platform are due out soon.  The traditional “PC at a desk” mode of web access is on the way out.

Reading about the Japanese culture of collaboration is very interesting and I’d love to see more research done in this area, perhaps as an offshoot of the Lean/JIT benchmark studies that U.S. business schools are so fond of running on Japanese manufacturers.

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