What was the outcome of this?

#Terin



On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 6:55 AM, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org> wrote:

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) 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


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