On 04/05/07, David Monniaux <David.Monniaux(a)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.