That is one way of putting it. But don't read it as saying "there are hundreds of Palestinian wikimedians out there, who just refuse to make it to Wikimania".

Rather read it as "we looked for Palestinian wikimedians all over the place for over a year; apparently they're not very easy to find".

The claim that Wikimania in Haifa excludes people from joining is just great for political tweets, but nothing more. For many more details you're more than welcome to do a quick search of the foundation-l archives from the second of half of 2010.

BTW regarding those tweets about the East Jerusalem development company: while they are listed as a sponsor on our website, their sponsorship is just free entrance to some of the sites in the Jerusalem tour we're offering (among other tours) on the Sunday just after the conference (they operate the sites and are giving us free tickets). That brings tourists (our Wikimania guests!) to Jerusalem (and to its mostly visited tourist attractions which are in the old part of the city). I think the local (Palestinian) merchants should be very happy with this tourism (they are). Those tweets are just political bashing without any real fact checking.



Harel

On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 22:17, Kim Bruning <kim@bruning.xs4all.nl> wrote:
On Tue, Jun 28, 2011 at 10:46:38PM +0300, Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> 2011/6/28 Kim Bruning <kim@bruning.xs4all.nl>
> > Is there anyone who currently wants to come to wikimania, but definitely won't be able
> > to come due to issues with permit/visa?
>
> Except doing our best to help the Palestinians who actually register
> to get the needed permits and to arrive, we also did our best to reach
> out to potential Palestinian attendees: We sent dozens of emails to
> Palestinian Wikipedians, software developers, activists of free
> culture and education, etc., and until now we got practically no reply
> from them, too, but we are still hopeful.

So far, there are 0 Palestinians definitely coming ?

sincerely,
       Kim Bruning


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