[Foundation-l] Wikimania 2006 - host city contest to open onSeptember 1st 20

[Jimmy Wales]

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