The History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia (HOPAU) project started in 2011. The aim of the project was “to write the History of the Australian Paralympic Movement, using the Wikimedia Foundation wikis, namely Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons and Wikibooks”.
Ross Mallett has been researching the progress of HOPAU’s Wikipedia presence.
In January 2017, there were 987 pages in the HOPAU category. These attracted 105,911 page views, an average of 3,416 per day.
The top five articles in January were: Dylan Alcott (19,507); Damien Thomlinson (2,626); Kurt Fearnley (1,554); Ashley Adams (1,550); and Para-alpine skiing (1,350).
According to Ross: “Dylan was the top HOPAU athlete for the month, probably because of the Australian Open. I think it’s pretty notable that not only did he persuade Tennis Australia to give him the Rod Laver Arena, but he filled it.”
In 2016, HOPAU articles attracted 2,800,526 page views, an average of 7,652 per day. There were almost 2 million page views in the period associated with the Summer Paralympic Games, but these data show, as Tony Naar (the HOPAU Project Facilitator) suggests, the articles created through the HOPAU project continue to be widely and regularly accessed.
The Australian Paralympic Committee has released images under a Creative Commons licensed and donated them for use on Wikimedia Commons. These images can be found at Category:Images from the Australian Paralympic Committee on Wikimedia Commons.
The three images used in this blog post are from that collection.
Photo Credits
Members of the Australian Paralympic Team pose with an entertainer from the hotel where they stayed in Singapore en route to the 1960 Rome Paralympic Games (Australian Paralympic Committee, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Dylan Alcott (Australian Paralympic Committee, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Sarnya Parker and Tania Modra (Australian Paralympic Committee, CC BY-SA 3.0)
