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

[James D. Forrester]

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Jimmy Wales wrote:
> 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.

I agree.

> 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.

... but are iris-scanned, photographed, and fingerprinted as part of
that process (oh, and you have to not check the box marked "I am a
member of a Communist organisation" ;-)). For some, this treatment of
people willing to come to a country and give her money as if they were
criminals is rather rude and a non-minor infringement of civil rights;
certainly, personally, I would have... difficulty overcoming this and
foregoing my moral objections to being seen to acquiesce to such a scheme.

> 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.

That's not terrible. But what about Iran (which did happen at WM05)?
Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Palestine? Chechnya? Etc. There are quite a few
countries that are hard to get visas from to visit the EU and the
States, and we should work out the cost vs. the benefit (if, say, it's
impossible to get a visa to a conference in the PRC from the ROC, but we
have no-one at all expressing interest, well, that's not so much a
problem; if, OTOH, there are dozens of active users, this is more serious).

> 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.

Completely agreed.

Yours sincerely,
- --
James D. Forrester
Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
E-Mail    : james at jdforrester.org
IM (MSN)  : jamesdforrester at hotmail.com
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