Okay, I've set up an account on NewsTrust[1], reviewed a couple of
articles they've selected, and tested Bawolff's addition to the social
bookmarks template

[1] http://newstrust.net/members/brian-mcneil
[2] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Social_bookmarks

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 23:41 -0400, bawolff wrote:

Interesting stuff. As an initial first step, I added a newstrust

button to the {{Social bookmarks}} template. Its somewhat in the

background right now. We might perhaps consider a bigger, "review this

article" button later if we really want to push this. (Their review a

story button also has the option to add what categories the article

falls in, but I haven't added that part as its not used in their basic

button, and its unclear if its really used (And its somewhat more

complicated to do, as i can't do it directly via template) If we want

that i can do it later.)

If someone else has signed up on NewsTrust I would be interested to see
what they get if they click the review button on the article I submitted
for review (protest against Lockheed Marten). Will this cause duplicate
submissions or match up with my prior submission? I did find getting a
submission in a little tricky; had to fiddle a few forms to get the
article in categories. As disclosure, I put myself as co-author on the
article because of extensive copyedit before I reviewed and published.

For having credibility ratings next to the source, sounds like a cool

idea (at the very least for a gadget, having it global would require

some careful consideration + potential privacy issues would need to be

looked at), but I can't see anyway of getting such information off

their site. The best i could find was a way of getting the last couple

articles that a specific source published, and the ratings for those,

but i did not see any way of getting the overall rating of a source,

or the specific rating of an article.

Amusingly, it seems NewsTrust relies a lot on Wikipedia for the basic
description of their sources, well, at least they did for Wikinews. That
*should* be good news as sources are likely to be listed with the same
names.

Before we start trying to do that there's a few points to raise.
I've CC'd Cary for input on the big question; privacy policy
repercussions. Here's what we've got to work with [3], and NewsTrust's
in-development policy[4].

[3] http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
[4] http://newstrust.net/about/privacy

Considering you explicitly have to sign up to NewsTrust to identify
yourself this seems much better than your average news site with loads
of embedded adverts.

What else. I think we should re-model the flagged revisions reader

feedback into some better design, perhaps inspired by newstrust.

(flagged revs reader feedback module in its current form, sucks. a

lot).

You'll get zero argument from me on that; is the review element getting
any flack on the Strategy wiki? It would be far, far better if users
were asked to review in a friendlier form (say a collapsed "Review this
article"). Better yet if that can actually be moved around the article
with a {{flagged review}} template. Within that it would be great if we
can pull up any NewsTrust rating, as well as readers submit a review to
NewsTrust.

My general concern is the idea ending up shot down because we could have
to share readers' IP details with NewsTrust. As it stands, use in
{{social bookmarking}} requires the user actively click on the NewsTrust
logo. As I understand it, quite a few projects have been very happy to
steal that template from us.

I've had encouraging feedback off-list about tying into NewsTrust's
source rating system. Here's how I see us using this:

{{source}}[5] is modified to have an optional "|NT" parameter. Where
present, the URL for the cited source is checked for on NewsTrust, the
story rating is retrieved, and a (likely smaller than NT uses) graphic
of their trust level for the story is displayed somewhere. If NewsTrust
doesn't have the story, the ideal is to fall back to their trust level
for the source that published the story. Here we're going to run into
the usual headaches with wire reports that are everywhere and end up
cited as published by Ya-who?

This is where I need Cary, or some other Foundation person's input. If
trust metrics are retrieved and displayed on-the-fly we either need to
make the reader's browser fetch them, or retrieve them periodically and
store locally. The latter has issues with keeping data current and
reflecting someone's review if they go over to NewsTrust and apply one.

[5] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template:Source

What's likely to be most interesting about having a play with NewsTrust
is how the "levels" of their reputation system go. As Fabrice explained
to me, the entry level only asks simple questions on how you rate an
article. As you build your personal reputation as a news reviewer you
are asked for more details. What this led me to conclude is that
whatever segment of their reviewer populace has an interest in writing
might be enticed to try doing so on Wikinews; they'll certainly be the
sort of critical thinkers we could benefit from.

Now, I pointed Fabrice at the writing contest[6]. I would be very
interested in getting the NewsTrust community to review the rules we're
running by (the ever-popular "anyone can edit" including, at the moment,
the competition rules). It may be possible to do some collaboration on
that. NewsTrust could feature our competition a few days before the
start, Wikinews invites readers not in the competition to look at
ratings on NewsTrust and possibly contribute their own.

[6] http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WWC-2010

NewsTrust, I think, would be an ideal group to bring in on the
post-competition Featured Article section. That is, all competition
entries scanned for FA candidates on Wikinews, and in some way
highlighted for review on NewsTrust. At the moment my penned-in idea
there is to invite some of the WMF Trustees (a few have journo
backgrounds) to get involved in that. The big question is, will offering
just five points for an article that gets promoted be enough of a
game-changer at that stage? Should it be higher - say 20 points?

I didn't ask Fabrice if they could help out with sponsorship for prizes,
so we're still begging for that. Anyone think it would be worth asking
on the Wikipedia rewards board if a few of the people who put cash up
there might chip together to have a netbook for the outright winner?

As far as the competition goes, few things seem needed first. A
{{WWC-2010 entry}} template with associated categories. I think we need
to start having [[Category:Writer <username>]] hidden categories, and a
userpage template to display them. I suspect if collaborating with
NewsTrust we could get them to add a category for comp. entries so
people can track it on their site.





--
Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org>|http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
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