Paralympics

The Paralympics is a sporting festival held every four years in conjunction with the Olympic Games that allows the world's best disabled athletes to compete on the world stage. The paralympic movement was started in Great Britain after the Second World War as a way to encourage amputee veterans to participate in sports.

London hosted the 2012 Paralympics, beginning two weeks after hosting the 2012 Summer Olympics.

History

The games date back to an athletic competition organized by the spinal cord injury department of the Stoke Mandeville Rehabilitation Hospital in England. In 1948, Sir Ludwig Guttmann, a neurosurgeon, started organizing an annual competition to help rehabilitate injured war veterans.

In 1976, Sweden hosted the first Winter Paralympic Games. In the early years, the venue for the Paralympics was not linked to the Olympic Games. However, the games have been held in the same city starting with the 1988 Seoul Korea Summer Games and the 1992 Albertville Winter Games. In 2001, the International Olympic Committee and the International Paralympic Committee agreed that when a host city was awarded an Olympics, the contract would also include hosting the Paralympic Games.

Funding

About half of the International Paralympics Committee's (IPC) funding comes from the Paralympics: the IPC receives a flat fee from the local organizing committee of each Paralympics in exchange for the marketing rights to a particular game. The other half of the IPC's funding comes from the IOC and large corporate sponsors. Some corporate Olympic sponsors also sponsor the Paralympics.

In some countries, the government funds paralympic athletes and their participation in the Paralympics. In other countries, including the United States, the paralympic organization must do its own charity fundraising. a lawsuit filed by In 2003, US paralympic athletes Tony Iniguez, Scot Hollonbeck and Jacob Heilveil filed a lawsuit challenging unequal funding of olympic and paralympic athletes. The United States Olympic Committee did not deny that it provided less funding to paralympic athletes but noted that the USOC relies on revenue generated by the media exposure of its athletes, so it allocates funds to reflect the difference between media interest in the Olympics and the Paralympics. Lower courts ruled that the USOC has the right to allocate its finances to athletes at different rates. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. However, while the lawsuit was pending from 2003 to 2008, paralympic funding from the USOC had nearly tripled. The $3 million that the USOC allocated to paralympics in 2004 had increased to $11.4 million in 2008.

Wikipedia

Historically, Wikipedia did not give much coverage to the Paralympics, because most paralympic athletes did not receive much independent media coverage and hence did not satisfy Wikipedia's notability test for having articles in its online encyclopedia. However, in 2011, the Australian Paralympic Committee (APC) issued an Request for Proposal to pay someone to write a history of Australia's paralympians. The original plans was for the resulting document to be published as a book. Instead, a team, which included the President (who was also then serving on the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee) and Vice President of Wikimedia Australia, won the contract and decided to post their work on Wikipedia. As a result, the APC hired one of them as a "Wikipedian in residence" and they also organized a competition to encourage volunteer editors to write about paralympians called "Wikimedians to the Games" offering as a prize two trips to London to cover the 2012 Paralympic Games. The contest did not draw many entrants nor generate much content. Most of the content was generated by the paid writer instead of by volunteers. At the last minute, they proposed a new combined Olympic/paralympic competition. Apparantly, the two people who are going to London to cover the Paralympics are the paid writer and her significant other. Their "wikinews" coverage gained about 300-400 readers, worldwide.