The Accreditation policy below requires someone to be a writer for several articles on Wikinews. It doesn't quite fit for any person who wants an accreditation for a press badge as a photographer. The reason behind my wondering over press badges is that I live in Southern California, a place where there is opporunity to meet a celebrity. I have no doubt, the same applies to anyone living in other parts of the world when it comes to sports figures and the like. The thing is that a photograph of a famous person on the English Wikipedia is usually a press or licensed photograph from a professional photographer... unless the copyright has previously expired on the photograph or they are a public figure of government, which of course means their photograph we get is public domain. But how do deal with trying to get a photograph of a television star without having any of the copyright restrictions? The only answers I can think of is to ask the publication to copyleft it, or take a picture of your own.
I have had thoughts, for some time, that Wikinews might change its accreditation policy to be more open to editors who, while not terribly active (or active at all) on wikinews, might still provide useful contributions to Wikinews and other project.
Surely, the community should still evaluate the editors who wish to be accredited by Wikinews, but I shall propose to the community that we open the policy a bit to include editors from other projects...
-N.
On 11/1/05, Jason Y. Lee jylee@cs.ucr.edu wrote:
The Accreditation policy below requires someone to be a writer for several articles on Wikinews. It doesn't quite fit for any person who wants an accreditation for a press badge as a photographer. The reason behind my wondering over press badges is that I live in Southern California, a place where there is opporunity to meet a celebrity. I have no doubt, the same applies to anyone living in other parts of the world when it comes to sports figures and the like. The thing is that a photograph of a famous person on the English Wikipedia is usually a press or licensed photograph from a professional photographer... unless the copyright has previously expired on the photograph or they are a public figure of government, which of course means their photograph we get is public domain. But how do deal with trying to get a photograph of a television star without having any of the copyright restrictions? The only answers I can think of is to ask the publication to copyleft it, or take a picture of your own.
-- Jason Y. Lee AKA AllyUnion
From: wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@Wikipedia.org] On Behalf Of Jason Y. Lee Sent: Wednesday, 2 November 2005 15:13 To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Press badges
The Accreditation policy below requires someone to be a writer for several articles on Wikinews. It doesn't quite fit for any person who wants an accreditation for a press badge as a photographer. The reason behind my wondering over press badges is that I live in Southern California, a place where there is opporunity to meet a celebrity. I have no doubt, the same applies to anyone living in other parts of the world when it comes to sports figures and the like. The thing is that a photograph of a famous person on the English Wikipedia is usually a press or licensed photograph from a professional photographer... unless the copyright has previously expired on the photograph or they are a public figure of government, which of course means their photograph we get is public domain. But how do deal with trying to get a photograph of a television star without having any of the copyright restrictions? The only answers I can think of is to ask the publication to copyleft it, or take a picture of your own.
The same policy could (and should) be expanded to cover photographers. It is an excellent policy.
Having photographs taken with free use on WikiNews (and Wikipedia) in mind is certainly something worth striving for. However, we should pay some heed to quality of product. It is easy enough to "clean up" an article, but there are limits to how much a photograph can be improved after it has been taken.
A request for photographer accreditation should be accompanied by a "portfoliio" of images already on WN/WP, and possibly the same sort of people who routinely look at Featured Image Candidates could cast an expert eye over them.
Peter (Skyring)