Wikinews-l June 2009

wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org

7 participants
4 discussions

Weather bot
by Milos Rancic 04 Aug '09

04 Aug '09

I finally made a weather bot according to my wishes. Its characteristics are: * It gathers information from wund.com, but it is possible to make plugins for other sites and protocols. * It may gather data from all over the world. * It may be localized in any language. The only problem is that one iteration takes at least 5-7 minutes just for weather in Serbia and just for Wikinews in Serbian. Probably, I would be able to run enough of instances for covering weather in Serbia for all Wikinews editions (or, questionable, to run enough of instances to cover the whole world for sr.wn). That means that I'll need your help (people who are able to run bots as cron jobs), so we may cover the whole world for all Wikinews editions. My other ask is related to programming the bot. I prefer to make the bot as a collaborative work because it is not reasonable to expect maintenance of one relatively huge project by just one person. I may make subversion repository at SourceForge (or at one of the servers in the company where I am working). If anyone of you are willing to join me, let me know that. Also, all other ideas are welcome. You may see its output here [1] (in Serbian). [1] - http://sr.wikinews.org/wiki/%D0%92%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%81%D1%8…

5 16

Meta site for all Wikinews editions
by Milos Rancic 29 Jun '09

29 Jun '09

I think that we need such place for a couple of reasons: * Meta is "too Meta" for our needs. We need a meta site which would be regulated by Wikinewsians. * All coordination will be moved to that site: this includes, but it is not limited to: ** Organizing bot work. ** Organizing work related to cooperation: translations, contacts and similar. ** Accreditation process should be moved there. * In the future, we should make Template: namespace at that site which would be used by all Wikinews editions. * We may generate there a set of documents which would help to the new editions how to start a successful edition. BTW, as a LangCom member, a number of times I mentioned that not just localization of the messages should be enough for the project approval. Wikinews edition is the most problematic for approval because it needs constant work. So, as a LangCom member, I would like to see defined rules by Wikinewsians for new edition approval. * Similarly to beta.wikiversity.org, Wikinews meta site may be used instead of Incubator: It would be much better if the process of creation of Wikinews edition would be monitored by Wikinewsians, not by contributors with just Wikipedian background. (While it is good enough formally to have contributors with just Wikipedian background for all other projects, Wikinews has very different needs than one repository of knowledge.) * Optionally, we may use something like wiki.wikinewsie.org for that purpose; but it has a number of limits.

3 2

Growth
by Tris 26 Jun '09

26 Jun '09

What is the growth of Wikinews like at the moment? I've found some of the outdated pages that charted growth in different ways, but they haven't been updated for a few years. How many new accounts are created each day, are articles created overall going up or not? If not, do we need to look at how we can get more people to contribute who create an account? Dottydotdot http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Dottydotdot

2 1

Infoboxes in edit window
by Tris 19 Jun '09

19 Jun '09

Hi all, Dottydotdot here. It would be very useful for me when writing articles if at the bottom of the edit page, where the templates are that you can click on to insert, there was a list of infoboxes-not neccesarily the countries, because I can guess them, but others that otherwise I have to go searching for. I'm pretty sure these can only be updated by an admin. Thoughts? Possible? Cheers!

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Wikinews-l June 2009