On 04/05/07, David Monniaux David.Monniaux@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.