[WikiEN-l] RE: Re: Press badges

[Brown, Darin]

> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2005 10:27:07 +1100
> From: "Peter Mackay" <peter.mackay at bigpond.com>
> Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Press badges
> To: "'English Wikipedia'" <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID:
> 	<20051104232712.YGYT1358.omta03sl.mx.bigpond.com at skyringstudy>
> Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="US-ASCII"
> > Just throwing this out there: I dont see how any
> > anti-credentialist organization can be in the business of
> > giving out credentials.
> 
> In the same wiki-way that everything else works here. The community
> decides
> who, based on their contributions, is able to present a professional face
> to
> the real world and a useful contribution to Wikipedia/WikiNews. I use
> "professional" here in the sense of "adhering to industry standards",
> rather
> than "being paid for".

In what other situations do we actually "present a professional face to the
real world"? It's clear that we have *internal* professional faces that we
present to ourselves -- arbitrators, admins, and the informal "credentials"
that someone attains over a period of time, but these are entirely internal.
When someone reads an article, all of these internal faces are shielded from
view. No one outside wikipedia need know about, acknowledge, or endorse
these internal faces. Whereas, a wiki-press pass would be something
completely different -- here, we *would* be asking outsiders to acknowledge
and endorse our professional faces. I think there's a difference.

> Nobody considers tabloid newspapers to
> hold
> to high standards of journalistic integrity, but they command wide
> readerships, and their journalists find little difficulty in gaining
> access
> to events. All we really need do is say "Google such-and such a subject"
> and
> Wikipedia is generally in the first ten entries, so we've got that sort of
> leverage to use with people who are after media exposure.

But, whatever you think of them, tabloids are in a sense, original research.
And so they are not only subject to legal issues which are avoided by
avoiding original research, but if we were to emulate them in this regard,
we would be subjecting ourselves to the same type of NPOV issues we subject
other news sources to. This is one caveat I have about press passes -- maybe
just for photographs they might be okay, but assigning press badges on a par
that journalists use, seems to be stretching the limits of what the project
is all about. Granted, I don't think we would ever have a POV of a Fox News
or the New York Post, but POV would always be an issue. (Simply the
selection of what events are considered "news-worthy" to attend is a POV.)
The line between reporting first-hand news sources vs. *being* first-hand
news sources is a fine one, but the line is still there.

darin