Before each summer and winter Paralympics, Tony Naar and his small team of enthusiastic volunteers set themselves a challenge: to create a Wikipedia page for every Australian para-athlete competing at the Games. In the past decade, this group – known as the Australian Paralympic history project – have created over 1,000 articles for para-athletes past and present. For each one, however, they have faced an obstacle: Wikipedia’s notability policy, which requires articles to “be notable, or ‘worthy of notice’”.
The project began prior to the London 2012 Paralympics. At the time, they partnered with Wikimedia Australia, the local chapter of the global Wikimedia Foundation, to offer an incentive: the two volunteers who created and edited the most articles ahead of the Games would win a free trip to London. “But one of the things we confronted was the notability requirement,” says Naar, a semi-retired sports administrator who previously worked for Paralympics Australia. “If you’re an Olympic athlete, you automatically met those notability requirements – just by being an Olympic athlete. Being a Paralympic athlete wasn’t good enough – you had to be a medallist or otherwise meet the notability requirements.”
In other words, para-athletes who had qualified for the Paralympics did not automatically qualify for Wikipedia. “That meant the people involved in the project had to be pretty creative,” says Naar. “They had to hunt down other sources to justify having the article about the athlete. For example, newspaper articles or radio or television interviews. It was a question of frantically hunting those down ahead of London.”
Ultimately, they succeeded – just prior to the 2012 Paralympics, every Australian Paralympian competing in London had their own Wikipedia page. Their hard work provided a valuable service; over the two weeks of the Games, they had almost two million page views. “It opened a lot of eyes [within the Paralympics community] because it way exceeded any other numbers,” says Naar. “The ABC televised the Paralympics and it way exceeded their views; it way exceeded views on Paralympics Australia’s official website. It indicated that there was a lot of interest in finding out information and Wikipedia was a great source for that.”
One might think that Wikipedia’s notability distinction between Olympic and Paralympic athletes was blatantly discriminatory and would have been swiftly changed after London 2012. Naar chuckles with resignation. “God no,” he says. “It has been a battle that we have fought a few times and have lost every time. At the moment that notability requirement stands – just being a Paralympian still doesn’t qualify you.”
Nonetheless, thanks to the team’s creativity, they have managed to create or update Wikipedia articles for every Australian para-athlete competing at Sochi 2014, Rio 2016, PyeongChang 2018 and Tokyo 2020, plus historical entries for past Paralympians. By the end of 2021, the team had written 617,797 words across almost 1,100 articles. In total, these articles have received just shy of 20 million page views.
These Wikipedia entries are the most visible part of the Paralympic history project’s tireless work. But it represents just the tip of the iceberg. The project began in 2010, when Naar, who had been with Paralympics Australia (then the Australian Paralympic Committee) for a decade in various leadership roles, became aware that Kevin Coombs OAM was unwell. Coombs, a wheelchair basketballer, is a hugely significant figure; he was the first Indigenous athlete to represent Australia at a Paralympic or Olympic Games, competing at five Paralympics and carrying the torch into the Sydney 2000 Paralympic opening ceremony.
“I’d been aware that Paralympics Australia and the Paralympic team were very innovative and forward looking, really in the moment,” says Naar. “But there wasn’t a massive amount of understanding or recognition of where the movement had gone before; it was very much based on the present, without acknowledgement of the past.”
A colleague expressed concern that Coombs was unwell (he is now 80) and suggested that they might interview the Paralympic legend. “That was really the impetus to get the project off the ground,” Naar says. He contacted the National Library of Australia and suggested they might expand their oral history project to include past Paralympians. Within weeks they had recorded an interview with Coombs. “We just took it from there,” he adds. Today, the National Library has over 50 oral history interviews with significant Paralympic figures.
The interview precipitated a moment of reflection at Paralympics Australia. “We thought, well, how can we capture the history of the movement in Australia?” says Naar. “What’s the best way of going about that?” Some wanted a book, but Naar was keen think bigger. “Lots of organisations produce books, but you tend to produce a few hundred copies, you give away 50 and the other 250 copies sit in boxes for years until someone throws them out,.”
Instead, Naar and Professor Keith Lyons at the University of Canberra approached Wikimedia Australia, who were immediately interested in the project. Blending digital and orthodox history, through academic, sporting and institutional partners, the Australian Paralympic history project was born. “It is a unique digital history project which combines traditional history elements and manages, presents and preserves them digitally in a way that is relevant to how people seek and use information in the 21st century,” says Naar. They are also working on a book, which will be published shortly.
In 2013, with the University of Queensland, the project received a grant of $250,000 from the Australian Research Council, in addition to funding from Paralympics Australia. The group have used the funding to engage researchers, conduct Wikipedia workshops, develop a 3,000-image strong photo library and create an interactive website. “We wanted to make it as accessible as possible,” Naar adds. “If you wanted to find out about the history of the Paralympic movement in Australia, anyone, anywhere could find it.”
The Tasmanian has been at the forefront of this work, initially as a Paralympic Australia employee and then contractor, together with an ad hoc group of about 60 volunteers (including Greg Blood, who creates the helpful Australia at the Paralympics summary pages each Games). While Paralympics Australia’s funding for the project ceased in May 2020 due to Covid-related cuts, Naar has continued on in an unpaid capacity – coordinating volunteers and managing the wider project.
Despite the current lack of financial support, Naar hopes that the project will endure. He says it has helped fill major gaps in Paralympic history: when the project started, Paralympics Australia only had archive imagery dating back to 1996; the project has subsequently collected photos from Australia’s participation in the first Games, in 1960, and at every Paralympics since. They have also hosted reunions for early teams, including a 50th anniversary of the 1960 Paralympics. “The fact that five decades later we could talk to the people who had been at the first Paralympic Games was very powerful,” Naar says.
Asked why he continues to work 20 hours a week, unpaid, on this project, Naar underscores the importance of history. “For me, it’s an ongoing acknowledgement of the people who made the movement what it is today. It’s important for sporting organisations to have a history and recognise that history.”
Current and former Paralympic athletes have expressed gratitude for the team’s work preserving their historic achievements. Naar cites a recent example to underscore the importance of accurately preserving history. “Last year in Tokyo, when Madison de Rozario won gold, the commentary team was saying that this was the first female Australian to win the Paralympic marathon,” he says. They were not the only ones – most news coverage led with this claim. Only, it was wrong.
“In actual fact, Jan Randles won a gold medal in the first wheelchair marathon held in 1984,” Naar says. (Embarrassingly, this author made the same error). The project has since collaborated with Randles to provide more information online. “Jan got fairly upset by the whole thing and we’ve since worked with her to make sure that the [Wikipedia] article has been updated and is more comprehensive and her story is out there. It means a huge amount to her.”
When Australia’s Winter Paralympians take to the slopes in Beijing this week, they can take heart knowing their achievements will be accurately recorded for future generations. And, despite Wikipedia’s discriminatory notability requirement, Naar and his colleagues will have found a way to ensure that every para-athlete has their own page even before the opening ceremony begins.
