It's ALL happening!
With the Rio Paralympics fast approaching, there's been lots of action behind the scenes on the Paralympic history project.In Canberra, Greg Blood and Liz Watt are supervising a team of students from Canberra Uni, focusing on articles about the athletes who will be in Rio and updating sport and athlete articles as selection events (such as swimming last week) are completed.
Lauren Robertson is an intern from Macquarie Uni and working out of the APC office. Lauren is uploading the latest portrait shots of athletes and team officials from the 2016 team processing sessions into Wikimedia Commons so that they can be used with the relevant Wikipedia articles. You can find them here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Category:Australian_Paralympic_Team_Member_portraits&filefrom=160600+-+John+Camens+-+3a+-+2000+Sydney+media+guide+scan.jpg#mw-category-media
Lauren is also uploading images from the London Games. The aim is to have two images of every Australian athlete, plus a range of general photos of the Games. Once they are uploaded, you will be able to find them here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:2012_London_Paralympic_Games. As there are many London athletes on the Rio squad, it they will assist in enhancing the articles for those athletes.
In no particular order, here is a rundown of other news about the project:
South Australian Don Worley, who attended the Games from 72-88 as an athlete escort and videographer (or whatever it was called in those days) has donated film of 4 Games from 72-84 to the National Film and Sound Archives under Creative Commons. The NFSA is currently digitising Don's films and the NFSA and APC will 'launch' the collection in July. This will add greatly to the project and we are also hoping it will be possible to extract still images. Don has also donated 700+ photos from the 1988 Games in Seoul. These will be digitised and added to the Wikimedia Commons collection.
The NLA Paralympic oral history interviews are a good source of information and content for Wikipedia articles (http://www.nla.gov.au/oral-history/australian-centre-for-paralympic-studies-oral-history-project). Many of the interviews have been indexed, so it is easy to find interesting and relevant sections. At a meeting last week, the team at the NLA reiterated that they are happy for audio clips from the interviews to be used in Wikipedia articles - a great way to add interest to articles!
It's old news, but not many may realise that Ross (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hawkeye7) and Laura (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LauraHale) achieved Good Article status for every article about the Australian Team performance at the 2014 Sochi winter Paralympics, including all the athlete articles and all the winter classification articles. That's setting a pretty high benchmark! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_at_the_2014_Winter_Paralympics as a jumping off point.
The APC is working with the National Sports Information Centre to create a 'home' for material that can be useful to people writing articles for the Paralympic History Project. This can include newspaper clippings, event programs, personal correspondence and other items. A test folder has been created. Once we have ironed out any bugs, these materials will be available to members of the HOPAU group through the Clearinghouse for Sport (https://www.clearinghouseforsport.gov.au/).
Save the date: The APC has scheduled the Rio Team Announcement for 20 June at Parliament House in Canberra. On that day, the full team will be announced formally.
