On Sun, 2009-12-06 at 16:39 +0000, Brian McNeil wrote:
NB! This email is CC'd to several people who have requested parts of Flagged Revisions be enabled on various Wikinews language versions. I would urge these recipients to subscribe to wikinews-l.
I would like to see so as many language versions of Wikinews as possible listed in Google News. Erik Moeller, WMF Deputy CEO, graciously put me in touch with someone who helped make it happen for English Wikinews, as far as I can tell it should be possible for
English French Hungarian Polish Portuguese Spanish
There are processes that need to be visible to Google and assure them of certain editorial controls, and at the moment there are some technical kludges required to meet other requirements laid out by Google.
For technical issues, some work is being done on a new MediaWiki extension:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20818
Hopefully Amgine will have another patch on offer soon, but I encourage all Wikinewsies to vote for this bug.
For non-English Wikinews editions, I'm happy to try and help get appropriate pages interlinked and presented to Google as proof of editorial control. Bawolff can also help with some of the technical measures and helper tools.
Ideally, given the six languages above, Google News could list us in a special way where a story is covered in several languages.
I would also like to see the upcoming Writing contest ( http://enwn.net/WC2010 ) expanded to languages that can get a Google News listing before the start date. This might encourage Google to sponsor a prize or two in light of having to implement measures to limit public access to certain newspaper websites.
I am not actively developing on this project.
I spent 8 weeks developing, 5 of which were spent attempting to get feedback from WMF devs, after which I abandoned the project when I was working on feature requests without any hope of it being implemented. When I did get feedback it was live review in IRC, was told (paraphraased) 'I don't want to look at the sql [the primary element of the script] for potential xss', and the developer did not like my style of development so I should 'clean it up and resubmit it.' Whatever the hell that might mean since 90% of the script is the sql.
The script as-is meets the specification, is secure, and it works. Spec: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/User:Amgine/Google_News_Sitemap. Working implementation: http://wiki.enwn.net/index.php/Special:SpecialGNSM.
Amgine