[Foundation-l] Wikinews is giving out press credentials

Tue Nov 8 14:43:47 UTC 2005

--- Traroth <traroth at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> a écrit :
> >Credentials are given by organizations - not by just some people on the
> >Internet (which is all any Wikimedia project is by itself). Using that term
> >in the real world where it has a specific meaning - to describe that process
> >is very misleading. Using that term and the Wikinews mark implies an
official
> >connection that does not exist. That is dishonest and an abuse of the mark. 
>  
> Does it mean Wikinews is not an organisation in itself ? I disagree. It is.
> And that means that Wikinews can choose the way it wants to give out
> credentials.

Sorry, but in any legal sense it is not. Wikinews is a project of the Wikimedia
foundation. Noting more from a legal perspective. The Wikinews community is a
collection of people who work on that project but who don’t have any legal
membership in it. All authority to use the Wikinews mark outside of that
community falls to the registered owner of that mark; the Wikimedia Foundation.
If the foundation wants to use the Wikinews community as its agent to select
people to be credentialed and thus be able to use the Wikinews mark on badges,
then that is fine. 

But the foundation must make that permission explicit and should put in place
reasonable oversight measures that would be used in case anybody abuses the
privilege of being credentialed. Again, in almost all cases, the community
should be the foundation’s agent in deaccreditation and reaccreditation. But
community processes are slow and in really bad cases the foundation should be
able to quickly remove credentials of offending users or even suspend the whole
process if it ever gets out of hand. 

All I want to do is protect the foundation and the good name of its projects.
It is simply potentially dangerous for people to use the foundation’s name
and/or the name of its projects to gain access and authority in the real world
they would otherwise not be able to have. For one thing, they need permission
to do that, for another, we need to have some type of official oversight on
this. 

-- mav

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