User:GRuban/Shankbone

David Shankbone is the pseudonym of David Miller, an amateur journalist, photographer, and editor for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Shankbone has been called Wikinews star reporter by the Columbia Journalism Review and a leading Wikipedia editor by Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post. His Creative Commons-licensed photographs of over 500 people illustrate an estimated 4000 Wikipedia articles, and have been reused on numerous blogs throughout the Internet. In December 2007, Shankbone became the first citizen journalist to interview a sitting head of state, Israeli President Shimon Peres.

Before Wikipedia
Shankbone graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and has lived in three countries (U.S., Spain, and U.K.), six U.S. states, and 17 cities.

In 2006, he dropped out of Fordham Law School, due to being unable to afford the tuition for his final year. He returned to his work as a paralegal, for Herrick, Feinstein, a major New York City law firm, and for a hobby, took up editing articles and taking photographs for Wikipedia with a digital camera his sister had given him for his birthday.

Career and coverage
Colleen Asper, writing in the Brooklyn Rail, described Shankbone's photographs as "incredibly wide ranging in their scope." Shankbone began contributing to Wikipedia in June 2006, and in 2007 he was noted as a "leading Wikipedia editor" in Haaretz.

In December 2007, he became the first of Wikinews's citizen journalists to interview a sitting head of state, Israeli President Shimon Peres. Miller was also profiled in the Columbia Journalism Review in January 2009, where his interviews were described as a "throwback to a time when Oriana Fallaci published long transcripts of her interviews in book form and David Frost broadcast a six-hour sit-down with Richard Nixon.” When Shankbone became the first Wikinews citizen journalist to interview a sitting head of state, it was seen by some as a milestone in the development of the site.

In 2007 Shankbone was invited to Israel by the Foreign Ministry and the America-Israel Friendship League, as part of a delegation of technology writers, including representatives from BusinessWeek, USA Today, PC Week and Salon, to review the Israeli technology sector. David Saranga, spokesman at the consulate in New York explained, "More than once we have faced editors connected to Israel that appear on Wikipedia in English that do not represent the reality in Israel. We decided to initiate a visit by Shankbone to describe Israeli reality as it is." While there, he requested an interview with Israeli President Shimon Peres, which to his surprise was granted. However, Shankbone later admitted he considered it to be one of the worst interviews he had undertaken.

He returned to Israel in 2009 to take photographs of the country and the Negev desert.