[Foundation-l] Assume Good Faith and Don't Bite Newbees

[Liam Wyatt]

But perhaps what you are suggesting is something along the lines of a
"verified account" (like in Twitter recently). Perhaps it wouldn't scale
well, I'm not sure. This is probably digressing from the original subject
but perhaps it might be an interesting technical solution for a question
that many experts/academics/GLAMs etc. have asked - "we would like
recognition". Could this mean that the user (e.g. a museum) could place
their logo on their userpage and say "these are our official actions on
Wikipedia and these are our official photograph uploads to Wikimedia
Commons". This would give us the ability to offer something that has made
FlickrCommons so popular - institutional recognition.

If there was a way to verify that a user with an institutional name was the
"real" institution (that wasn't too bureaucratically difficult to set up, or
administer) would that go some of the way to solving the problem of why we
don't accept institutional accounts?

It doesn't solve the other reason why institutional user accounts are banned
- because they can be "promotional" - but that is more a matter of the
content that they create rather than the username itself.

-Liam [[witty lama]]

wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata


On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:07 PM, effe iets anders
<effeietsanders at gmail.com>wrote:

> could you perhaps point to that general WMF policy? Or do you mean you
> would
> like to see such a policy, but there is none yet?
>
> Lodewijk
>
> 2009/12/3 Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com>
>
> > On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > Although I can understand that there are genuine reasons why the "anti
> > > organisational account" rule is in place, can I mention that having an
> > > organisational account is one of the main things that GLAM institutions
> > have
> > > asked from us. If a museum wants to upload their own photographs to
> > Commons
> > > (something which I think we all would love to support) they have
> > requested
> > > that they be able to upload those images under their own organisational
> > > username. This in itself doesn't necessarily mean we should change our
> > > policies, but it's just an example of a good outcome that changing our
> > flat
> > > ban on organisational accounts would achieve.
> >
> > Then they should sign contracts with WMF. OR: They should send their
> > identification to WMF staff and WMF should make clear that those accounts
> > are
> > exceptions from the general policy.
> >
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