The welcome home Olympic parades have started in Australia just as Paralympians are preparing for the opening of the Paralympic Games in eight days time in London.
The official website for the Paralympic Games has detailed information about the schedule for the 21 sports in the program (29 August to 9 September).
The ABC is covering the Games in Australia.
This year’s Paralympic Games have a particular resonance with me. For the last twelve months or so I have been following an ambitious project to write a Wikipedia history of Australian Paralympians. As of 18 August, there were 190 articles available on Wikipedia, and they had been viewed a total of 114,949 times in the past month. In addition, there have been 19 Wikinews articles viewed a total of 17,281 times.
The project has been overseen by Tony Naar of the Australian Paralympic Committee. Tony is the first keynote speaker at a Disability Conference being held in Coventry later this week. His topic is Claiming and understanding the history of a movement – the Australian Paralympic history project. This is his Prezi presentation for the keynote.
I imagine Tony’s presentation will be illustrated with the APC’s remarkable collection of images. This month one of the newest members of the Wikipedia history project team, Tara McPhail, started to upload images from the 2011 Australian Paralympic Team processing sessions into Wikimedia Commons.
Laura Hale is going to report on the Games and has an excellent blog post about mobile reporting.
It is likely that the Games in London will see the award of Australia’s 1000th Paralympic medal. To date Australian Paralympians have won 960 medals at Paralympic Games.
Photo Credits
Brad Ness
Louise Sauvage
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