Below is an email I have sent to someone at Google (a contact Erik Moeller
was gracious enough to share).
Keep your fingers crossed, and keep putting those review templates on the
talk pages!
Brian McNeil
Subject: Wikinews and Google news
Hi Josh,
Erik Moeller, the Wikimedia Foundation's deputy CEO, gave me your email
address as a Google contact who - if not able to help - at least is someone
who would know who at Google I should be talking to.
I am one of the senior editors on the Wikimedia Foundation's English
Wikinews project (
http://en.wikinews.org <http://en.wikinews.org/> ) and it
has been a long-term goal of mine, and of many of the other contributors, to
see our little project listed in Google's news index. In the past we've been
briefly listed but dropped due to the nature of the project; as a wiki
anyone can edit and this causes issues for accuracy and reliability in our
reporting, something which - quite understandably - is a concern to those
trying to maintain a high standard for the Google news index.
However, a major new development in the MediaWiki software has been enabled
on our wiki that should address most of the concerns over the nature of the
site. This is the Flagged Revisions extension which allows trusted
contributors to mark specific revisions of our articles as having been
checked, effectively giving us a degree of editorial control. This
extension, as a privilege, has been granted only to administrators of the
site and those with a well-established reputation for creating factually
accurate articles. The net effect is that anyone not actually logged into
the site - such as the GoogleBot - will only see versions of articles that
have been checked, copyedited, and given a basic review. My personal opinion
is that this technical enforcement of a 2-3 person review of each article is
a more stringent standard than many of the blogs and PR-machine sites that
are listed in Google news.
If you are an appropriate person to discuss this with, please let me know
any questions you may have on the subject. If not, I would greatly
appreciate an introduction to someone within Google who is involved with
news.google.com. At the moment, the Flagged Revisions MediaWiki extension is
still on the radar of the developers and there are a few options Wikinews
has open to be more stringent in our editorial control. A listing is - for
many of our contributors - a holy grail that should bring the publicity and
exposure the site needs to draw in additional contributors and increase the
breadth and depth of our coverage. I would welcome any opportunity to liaise
with Google staff and make this a reality.
Regards,
Brian McNeil
Wikinews Bureaucrat and Accredited Reporter