Zachary Harden wrote:
My country, the United States, is very hard to get into and some of our Wikipedians from overseas will have problems getting in, such as those coming from China.
This is widely believed, but is it actually true?
We should get some hard facts before excluding the US completely from consideration.
For citizens of (much of) the EU, Australia, and Japan (and a few other places like Singapore and Brunei), there is no need for a visa at all. You just show up and come on in, no problem.
For China, the case you mention, according to the travel.state.gov website, the waiting time for an exchange visa (cultural exchange, one of the types of visas which could be used to visit a conference I think), is 1 day. Even an ordinary tourist visa has a wait time of only 17 days.
However my information is quite incomplete, and I am not arguing that the visa issue is a non-issue. I'm just saying that we should not make assumptions.
--Jimbo