I just got off of an hour long Skype chat with Fabrice Floren, founder
of
http://newstrust.net. Jimmy suggested to him it might be interesting
if there are ways Wikinews can work with them. I think there are, but to
some extent we need to check we're all within WMF rules, and we might
want to kick a few more people about Amgine's MediaWiki extension for
XML feeds.
NewsTrust is a non-profit, ostensibly a news aggregator, but they
challenge people to review news and become more critical of it. They're
a hell of a lot more clued up about reviewing and being critical of news
than the feeble review widget in MediaWiki.
I was up-front with Fabrice, Wikinewsies will look at their site and
say, "what can we steal?" Well, unless we run into the privacy policy,
we're welcome to steal all their gadgets, and get them reviewing our
stuff.
My thoughts on this at the moment are there is room for collaboration;
feeding Wikinews stories into NewsTrust and putting the NewsTrust
review/rating widget on each Wikinews article. This could be
incorporated into the publish template.
Second, they have pretty good background on the sources they follow and
are crowdsourcing "credibility ratings" for them. Could we pull that
data into the {{source}} template on Wikinews? By this I mean someone
reading one of Wikinews' articles scrolls down to the sources, it says
"The Guardian", gives the WikiTrust rating for the source, and the cited
article.
Fabrice had not had a lot of time to look at Wikinews articles, but will
be sticking a couple up for the NewsTrust community to review. Cirt will
be pleased to know that at a semi-casual read his "Glenn Beck" coverage
was deemed comprehensive and well-researched.
I'm going to sign up on the site and have a real dig round in the
morning. For now, there's the following links that might interest people
like, ooh, I don't know ;-) Bawolff?
http://newstrust.net/tools/buttons
http://newstrust.net/sources/the_guardian
http://newstrust.net/widgets
http://newstrust.net/feeds/todays_feeds
I also have a PDF of a NewsTrust presentation (~6Mb) if you want a copy
let me know a suitably well-endowed email address.
--
Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org>|http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
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