The use of a blog is not helping promote Wikinews. It has a pitiful pagerank compared to the main site and unless you hit on a lot of words in an article title it appears well down the results list.
The same issue would impact any separate "stable" site, a sub-page less so.
I'm sure there are others on-list who have a far better understanding of the ins and outs of pagerank and other search engine's ranking methods but as I understand it Wikinews gains a lot from crosslinking with Wikipedia whereas we might lose this if we're using a static site.
Brian McNeil
-----Original Message----- From: foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:foundation-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Whitworth Sent: 16 December 2007 17:42 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us?
First, Google requires an indexing number within the news item URL, IIRC 5 digits or more. This - to my way of thinking - would be best met by
serving
up a URL containing the flagged revision's id. If a non-logged in user requests this page and a later version is currently flagged a supercedes header should be returned to the browser.
Second, from looking at the test wiki for F.R. it seems the usual configuration is you can't flag until you have a certain edit count, and been on-wiki for a certain time. This isn't appropriate for an editorial review team. We have a number of people who I'd trust fully with the
buttons
on their home language, but not on en. where it is their 3rd or 4th language. Everyone on the editorial team would meet these criteria, but
not
everyone meeting these criteria should be on the editorial team.
These are both compelling reasons for a separate website, or a separate section of the existing wikinews website, should be created. Think of Veropedia as a guide for this. You create news stories on-wiki at Wikinews, and then you move them over to the static website, after they have been properly checked. This is similar to how Wikinews currently uses a blog that must be manually updated to show the most current wikinews stories. The list of people with upload access to the static site would be small, and likely selected by the community directly (as opposed to simple technical requirements).
Once hosted in a separate place, they could be given indexing numbers, properly forwarded to the correct locations, etc.
--Andrew Whitworth
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