Meeting:2011 AGM/Candidates/Graham Pearce

Members, I'm from Perth, Western Australia, and my username for all Wikimedia projects, including Wikimedia Australia, is Graham87. I began to edit the English Wikipedia in February 2005, became an admin there in August 2007, and joined Wikimedia Australia in April 2011.

I’m enthusiastic about WMAu's aims to promote the use of Wikimedia projects in Australia and its efforts to encourage organisations to release their work under free content licences. WMAu can and will be at the forefront of a gradual but definite movement towards making more cultural content free, not only in Australia, but I hope in our region of the world. The opportunities are only now becoming apparent, and I see a committee member’s role as engaging both internally, with WMAu members, and externally, with collaborative organisations and individuals. I'm particularly interested in the moves to support innovation in foreign languages and WMF projects, including the proposal to forge ties with the Indonesian chapter.

I want to encourage editors from minority groups, especially those with disabilities, to edit Wikipedia. Although I’ve been totally blind since birth, and I use a screen reader to access the Internet, that’s never stopped me from achieving my goals. On Wikipedia I enjoy copy-editing, and I’ve worked towards improving the site's accessibility for users of screen readers. I’m part of the project on The History of the Paralympic Movement in Australia, and recently helped out at a workshop in Perth to teach Paralympians how to edit Wikipedia. There’s more information about my work on my Wikipedia user page.