[Commons-l] [Wikinews-l] Accredited photographer status?

[David Gerard]

On 04/05/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux at free.fr> wrote:

> Organizers of such events do not generally grant press access to random
> individuals. They want professionals, with a press card (we cannot help
> there, at least in France, since press cards are only for professional
> journalists), or at least, if we're lucky, they want an organization to
> endorse the photographer.
> Think of it this way: organizers cannot let every Tom, Dick and Harry go
> to front row and take pictures, for practical reasons. In the past, the
> criterion for admittance was "being a press photographer", which meant
> one doing press photos as a professional job. In the era of
> user-generated content, blogs, wikis etc. this criterion is becoming
> somewhat of an annoyance. On the other hand, I can understand that
> organizers and officials don't want hundreds of amateur photographers
> rushing in with their compact cameras...
> Wikimedia France talked about this issue to various officials and
> organizers, and everybody seems to agree that there is a problem. We've
> been asked to provide proposals. We'll have to think about this seriously.


FWIW, the prospective Wikimedia UK (which is still waiting on Delphine
getting around to returning a signed copy of the agreement) has
expressly planned to accredit people as it helps free content. Because
we're *so* not the publisher of WMF-hosted content and have no
leverage over them.


- d.