Please remember that as soon as the organisation "endorses" any person to contribute content to the projects, it puts itself in a "publisher" kind of position, which we need to avoid at all costs, since the organisation is *not* a publisher.

Why do people have to be "endorsed" to develop and create free content? I am rather proud of Wikipedia's celebrity photographer, who politely takes pictures for Wikipedia articles without any endorsement, just like the best of Wikipedia's editors, politely creating accurate content on encyclopedia-worthy topics, without any endorsement from Wikipedia. Isn't this what Wikipedia is?

K P a écrit : Because some pictures cannot be taken unless one has been granted special access conditions to a "press area". It is for instance very difficult to take pictures of the speakers at a political rally unless you're really in the front, which is reserved for the press and VIPs. The same applies to a variety of events, or even to photographs of the inside of buildings, etc. Practical example: members of Wikimedia France took photographs of presidential candidates during the election run. In some cases, they were simply shooting from the public (and thus had to deal with e.g. getting pushed when taking photos and the like), but the best quality photographs were taken from the "press area", and they got access to this area because Wikimedia France asked them to be authorized to enter this area. (At least for major candidates; minor candidates who do around 1% of votes tend to have more informal procedures.) 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.

Would it be possible for the WMF to make a deal with an actual publisher? They could, say, give us a press pass in return for us giving them a free license to use the photographs. The St. Petersburg Times is run by a non-profit and is right down the street. Maybe they'd be willing to hook up the WMF with a press pass to use for events they weren't sending anyone to anyway? Just a thought. I don't know much about how these things work.