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…
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.
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
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!