Monday, November 28, 2011

Identifying competitors: Your help needed!

We have a new category in Wikimedia Commons: Unidentified paralympic competitors that groups photos that we need help identifying who everyone is in the photo.

If you can help, take a look at the image thumbnails, click one to make it larger, read the description to see who we do and don't know in the image, if you think you know who the 'other' person is then please let us know. You can do this by:
  1. editing the image page directly
  2. leaving a message on the page's discussion (tab at top of page), 
  3. leaving a comment on this blog post, 
  4. or sending a message to the HOPAu email forum. 


Any of those channels will get to us all eventually.

Here's an example:


We know who the Australian in the middle is, the one challenging for the ball, it's Amanda Carter. But who is the person playing the ball, and who is the person on the left frame? So far, the image's description reads:
Australian women's wheelchair basketballer Amanda Carter challenges for the ball in a game against the USA at the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games
So, if you know who the people are in the 1996 team from the USA, you can probably help us!

Friday, November 25, 2011

Tony Naar's update

This week I wanted to share our latest Wikipedia “breakthroughs”.

We have just started a mission to record the subjects of Paralympic articles reading the text of the article about themself. This is a bit innovative within Wikipedia and we feel it will give a great personal touch to the articles.

Recently in Canberra, our APC intern Nick Gregory-Roberts recorded Chris Nunn reading the first “spoken article” – catch it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Nunn. The photo of Chris and the recording were made on an iPhone.

This innovation has been covered today in The Signpost, a weekly e-newspaper dedicated to Wikipedia and Wikimedia Foundation projects - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-11-21/News_and_notes  - under the title “Autowikiography”, and includes the pic of Nunny. This newsletter is widely read by Wikipedia editors around the world.

Since the audio was recorded on Chris’ article, the number of daily views of the Wikipedia article about him has increased from an average of about 3 a day to an average of more than 10 a day, with a peak of 85 in one day when the recording was uploaded. There will certainly be a spike after today’s story.

In the past 30 days alone, 368 Australian Paralympic articles have been viewed more than 50 times each and there have been a total of 70,570 pageviews of articles about the Paralympic movement in Australia.

Articles about Troy Sachs (3,420 views), Ashley Adams (3,389), basketballer Julianne Adams (2,559), Evan O’Hanlon (2,149),Kurt Fearnley (1,574), 200 Team swimmer Casey Redford (1,217) and Steve Graham (923) all featured in the Did You Know section during that period. However, articles about other Paralympians also attracted lots of views in the past 30 days – Michael Milton (814), Louise Sauvage (798), Jessica Gallagher (543), Matt Cowdrey (529), 1964/68 Paralympian Elizabeth Edmondson(517) leading the way with more than 500 views in the past 30 days.

Rounding out the most viewed articles was Australia at the 2000 Summer Paralympics, with 507 pageviews.

Every one of these articles, except the last, has been created over the past 3 months through the history project.

So whether you’re autowikiing like Nunny, or just looking for info, it seems that there is interest in the Wiki world in Australia’s Paralympic stories!

Regards,

TN

Tony Naar
General Manager, Knowledge Services
Australian Paralympic Committee