Message: 1 Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2005 10:27:07 +1100 From: "Peter Mackay" peter.mackay@bigpond.com Subject: RE: [WikiEN-l] Re: Press badges To: "'English Wikipedia'" wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Message-ID: 20051104232712.YGYT1358.omta03sl.mx.bigpond.com@skyringstudy Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"

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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