Hello, I am proposing the creation of a separate organization that would allow Wikinews to properly handle press accreditation. The Wikimedia foundation has been unable to do this due to concerns over being seen as the editor and the legal consequences that go with that. Proper press accreditation is however very necessary for Wikinews. A separate organization with a trademark license would be able to properly handle press accreditation and have very minimal assets at risk. This organization would not handle anything beyond accreditation and tools to provide support for accreditation. I am in no way proposing splitting Wikinews from the foundation or anything like that. We are overall very happy with the foundation, but we have a need that the foundation is unable to provide for. The problem: The English language Wikinews has an accreditation policy [1]. This allows us to receive press credentials at events and also assists us in getting recognition as media for interviews and the like. The press pass usually allows free access to an event or, priority access to normally off-limits areas. At the present we have a rather awkward arrangement for accrediting users. Users who have gone through our accreditation process are considered community accredited. The lack of any sort of organization behind creates a problem when the events require a letter from the organization before issuing the press pass (the G8 being the most recent), and we have been unable to get the board/foundation to do this or officially approve the accreditation program. The problem with this is in order to obtain press badges and other press benefits a user must either confuse the person (risking the request being denied) with an explanation of how they are not really representing Wikinews but rather the Wikinews Community or they must mislead the person into thinking they really do represent Wikinews. There are several other resources the foundation has been unable to provide that are very helpful to us such as official e-mail addresses. Brian McNeil has the wikinewsie.org domain and has offered e-mail addresses with it. The response rate with these addresses has greatly increased. Once again there are legitimate concerns that prevent the foundation from being able to do this, but a separate foundation would be able to. -Craig Spurrier [[n:Craig Spurrier]] 1. http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Accreditation_policy