This is just a little tidbit of information for those who may not know much (or anything) about Hikari.

Name: Hikari
Name in the Dub: Dawn
Name in the Pokemon Special Manga: Berlitz Platina
Age: 10
Hometown: Futaba Town (Twinleaf Town)
Ribbons: 4
Current Pokemon Party:
-Pochama (Piplup)
-Mimioru (Buneary)
-Pachirisu
-Manmoo (Mamoswine)

Hikari hails from the beginning town in the Diamond & Pearl video games, Futaba Town. Her Japanese name means "light", while her dub name has a similar meaning, but the beginning letter, "D", also correlates to the Pokemon Diamond game. (Shinji, or Paul, has the correlation to the Pokemon Pearl game) "Berlitz" is her family name in the Manga, while her first name, Platina, is directly related to the recently-released Pokemon Platinum (Platina in Japan).

When she is first seen in the Anime, Hikari almost immediately reveals she wants to become a Pokemon Coordinator, just like her mother was. When she later goes to Nanakamado-hakase's (Professor Rowan) lab in Masago Town, she chooses Pochama as her starter after having a little "misadventure" with the water Pokemon. Hikari tries to start her journey as a Trainer/Coordinator alone, but quickly realises it's not as easy as she had thought. While trying in vain to catch different Pokemon, she runs across Satoshi's Pikachu, who was badly hurt from an earlier encounter with Roketto-dan (Team Rocket). Once she finds out it belongs to a trainer, she takes it to the Pokemon Center to heal, then she back-tracked to try to find Pikachu's trainer. She later finds Satoshi and Takeshi, and she later joins them in their travels thru-out the Shinou region.

After a few embarrassing attempts at trying to catch a Mimioru, Hikari finally gets one. Strangely enough, this Mimioru has a huge crush on Satoshi's Pikachu. Later on, Hikari enters her first Pokemon Contest and loses in the second round. Within a few more eps, she catches a Pachirisu, who has a very spunky attitude and was originally very hard for her to control. Sometime later, she enters a second Contest and wins the ribbon. Another expanse of time later, she catches a Buiseru (Buizel), but later trades it for Satoshi's Eipam (Aipom), which later evolves into Etebosu (Ambipom). About 50 episodes after she caught Buiseru, Hikari catches an Urimoo (Swinub). Later on, Urimoo evolves all the way to Manmoo (Mamoswine), and like Satoshi's Rizudon (Charizard), it refuses to obey her for a time. In DP124, Hikari "released" her Etebosu, giving it to the champion of the Pokemon Ping-Pong tournament.

Hikari has entered many contests; however, she has lost in the first round of two contests. This has never happened to Haruka (May), who was the first Coordinator to travel with Satoshi. Hikari has entered other contests outside of the normal Super Contests, and has managed to win a current total of four ribbons. There are a lot of similarities between Hikari and Satoshi, but I won't go into them, since some people may think I'm trying to convince others to become PearlShippers. If there's anything else you'd like to contribute to this, or if you have any questions, feel free to comment. Oh yeah, I got some of this info from Bulbapedia, in case anyone's wondering. Most of it is stuff I already knew.

Also, a big thanks to the following for helping to supply Hikari-related info:
~spectral-illusions
~Robert-the-Raccoon