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.
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.)
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.
Feel free to send me said pdf. Can't guarantee i'll read 6 mb of pdf (unless there's a lot of pictures ;), but i'll flip through it.
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).
cheers, bawolff
On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 6:33 PM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
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 Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.
Wikinews-l mailing list Wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
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.
Dear Brian,
It was great to speak with you yesterday - I'm glad that we got along so well, and that you are interested in working together!
Thank you so much for moving so swiftly to contact your community about a possible collaboration between NewsTrust and Wikinews.
We will discuss this idea in our editorial meeting on Monday. We really appreciate your commitment to factual reporting from a neutral perspective, and it appears that we have many shared values in common.
We are also honored that you are willing to consider using NewsTrust as a possible tool for judging the entries of participants in your upcoming writing contest (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WWC-2010). We will discuss the idea of cross-promoting this contest on both of our sites at the end of January and perhaps again in early or mid-April. A good way to do this might be to use our News Hunt format at that time, if you all find the idea interesting. Read more about our News Hunts below, as well as the attached PDF with more details about NewsTrust.
I am also delighted that you were able to install our NT review buttons so quickly on the Wikimedia article pages. Thanks, bawolff, nicely done! See my response to your comment below.
At your request, we already corrected the misspelling of your name on our source profile page for Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/sources/wikinews
Note that is is now possible for you to add one of our source widgets on your site, listing stories for review from Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/widgets?url=/sources/wikinews/for_review
You can customize your widget in many different ways on that page (be sure to click on 'More Options') and we have many topic widgets you might consider putting next to articles that would benefit from more related stories on the same topic.
We've also started to review a couple of your featured stories, which we encourage you to review as well:
http://newstrust.net/stories/506880/toolbar?go=review
http://newstrust.net/stories/507108/toolbar?go=review
(if you are a co-author of any of these articles, or have any serious conflicts of interest, please check the appropriate box in the 'About You' section of our review form, as Brian was kind enough to do for one of the articles he co-wrote)
Lastly, I also started a Smart Feed for Wikinews here, using your feedburner RSS feed: http://newstrust.net/feeds/180/show
This will make it easier for any of us to submit some of your upcoming stories from your feedburner feed, since much of your metada is automatically pulled from your feed. However, I encourage you to focus on posting some of your best stories, so we don't flood our review pipeline with too many stories from Wikinews right away.
We are in the middle of a News Hunt on Climate Change, which will keep us busy through the weekend, and I have to prepare for a board meeting at the end of the week, so I will not be able to review any more stories from you guys until the following week. Thanks for your understanding. But if you have any good articles about Social Change, we would be happy to have our community review them, as that will be one of our major themes next week.
I would also like to introduce our associate editor Kaizar Campwala, who is our point person for News Hunts and partnerships. Kaizar can be reached at kaizar@newstrust.net and can answer any other questions you might have about using our service.
Look forward to continuing this discussion in coming weeks.
All the best,
Fabrice
P.S.: Do you guys know how we could encourage a Wikipedia writer to write an entry about NewsTrust on their site?
We understand and respect Wikipedia's rules against writing entries about yourself -- or asking your friends to do it -- so we have not made any attempts to have an entry written about us to date.
But we do think that it would be reasonable for someone to write one, given all that we have contributed to this field over the years (see attached project overview).
Would you be willing to nudge an experienced Wikipedia writer interested in this topic to consider us as a worthy subject for an article?
__________________________________________________________________
ABOUT NEWSTRUST
NewsTrust helps people find good journalism online, so they can make more informed decisions as citizens.
We're nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to news literacy and civic engagement. Our social news network features a daily feed of quality news and opinions from mainstream and independent sources, based on ratings from our reviewers. Our web review tools enable the public to evaluate accuracy, fairness, context and other core journalistic principles -- and help people become more discriminating news consumers in the process. We also rate our reviewers based on performance, to increase the reliability of our reviews and help them grow their own news literacy. To find out more, check our site: http://www.newstrust.net/
NewsTrust has attracted a growing community of journalists, educators and citizens, who share a passion for quality news and information, serving over a million visitors last year. Our media partners include The Washington Post, PBS NewsHour, the Huffington Post and Scientific American -- and our educational partners include Stanford University, Stony Brook and the University of Nevada, to name but a few.
NewsTrust's Executive Director is Fabrice Florin, a former journalist and a digital media pioneer at Apple and Macromedia. Our team includes a select group of award-winning journalists, technologists and community organizers -- with advisors such as Dan Gillmor, Craig Newmark, Howard Rheingold and other media innovators from organizations like the Associated Press, Google, the Poynter Institute and Stanford University.
Founded in 2005 and based in Mill Valley, California, NewsTrust is funded through grants and private donations. The MacArthur Foundation is our main funder and has awarded two multi-year grants to support NewsTrust's online credibility service. Other funding sources include Ashoka, Ayrshire Foundation, Mitch Kapor Foundation, Sunlight Foundation and Tides Foundation, as well as Google and private donors such as Craig Newmark (Craigslist) and Doug Carlston (Public Radio International). Though we are nonprofit, we aim to run a sustainable business, and plan to generate revenue from online sponsorships, memberships, licensing and partner services to support this project in coming years.
For more information about NewsTrust, view our About page: http://newstrust.net/about
__________________________________________________________________
THE NEWSTRUST DIFFERENCE
Our collaborative evaluation system is more effective for evaluating quality information than other social news sites like Digg.
Here are some key differences between our services: * we rate journalistic quality, not just popularity * we track ratings for each publication in our source reputation database * we feature stories from our most trusted sources in our daily listings * citizens using our tools can assess news quality as well as professionals * our multiple-rating evaluations are more reliable than single ratings
To discourage gaming, we offer these preventive measures: * reviewers are identified by their real names * we rate our reviewers based on the quality of their work * our reviewers' ratings are weighted based on their own member level * member levels are based on activity, experience, ratings and transparency __________________________________________________________________
ABOUT OUR NEWS HUNTS
NewsTrust organizes regular News Hunts for good journalism on important public issues, in partnership with leading news providers and journalism schools. Our partners so far include leading media organizations like the Washington Post, PBS's NewsHour, Scientific American, Huffington Post and the Council on Foreign Relations -- as well as educational organizations like Stanford University, Northeastern, University of Nevada and Arizona State University.
A News Hunt is a bit like a scavenger hunt for quality information. For each News Hunt, we invite our partner communities to join forces with us, and review hundreds of stories in weeklong searches for good journalism on topics like the Economy, the Environment, the Middle East, and Education. Participants typically include news professionals, content experts, concerned citizens, educators and students, all using the NewsTrust review tools for this common quest. At the end of each News Hunt, we collectively recommend the best news coverage on that topic, based on ratings from your community and ours.
Our News Hunts have helped hundreds of thousands of people become more discriminating news consumers this year -- empowering them to make more informed decisions as citizens. By focusing on factual evidence and constructive dialog, we hope NewsTrust can bring Americans closer together -- and broaden their perspective about journalism and democracy.
Partnering with NewsTrust can help the public develop a better appreciation for quality news and opinion -- and support the core journalistic and civic values we stand for.
Here are some of the News Hunts we have organized recently: * Climate Change (Link TV) * Lobbyists (Washington Post's WhoRunsGov) * Psychology (Miller-McCune) * Health Care (Huffington Post's Eyes & Ears) * Afghanistan (WNET's WorldFocus) * Pakistan (Huffington Post and Eyes & Ears) * Obama's First Hundred Days (PolitiFact and U. of Nevada) * Black Experience (PBS, Tavis Smiley and U. of Santa-Clara) * Money (Consumers Union + Stanford * Bush Legacy (Washington Post) * Economy (NewsHour, PBS and University of Nevada) * Immigration (New America Media) * Presidential Election (PBS Engage and P.O.V.) * Media and Politics (Poynter Institute and PolitiFact) * John McCain (Huffington Post and OffTheBus) * Internet/Digital Natives (Frontline and Stanford University) * Middle East (CFR.org, Global Voices, and LinkTV) * Environment (Scientific American and University of Nevada)
We are discussing more partnerships with major new providers and journalism schools in 2009. We work with our partners to find the best coverage on important issues like Energy, Health Care, Human Rights, or about any topic that they think will interest their community. We also invite them to add our top-rated news widgets on their sites, where they can act as a scoreboard for our joint News Hunts. We have widgets for dozens of hot news topics (e.g.: Barack Obama, Global Warming, War in Iraq), as well as for hundreds of sources and members featured on our site, and they're a great way to strengthen our partnerships: http://newstrust.net/widgets/
Our partners typically promote our News Hunts to their communities -- and announce them prominently on their sites, blogs and email newsletters, at the start of each week. Many of them also participate actively as a reviewers, submitters and creators of quality journalism on the News Hunt's chosen topic. NewsTrust manages the projects and provides most of the legwork for these News Hunts.
You can find more about previous News Hunts on our blog: http://newstrust.net/newshunt/
On Dec 12, 2009, at 6:54 AM, Brian McNeil wrote:
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.
Thanks, bawolff, that's wonderful!
Brian, to answer your question above, clicking on our NT review button on a story that has already been submitted will take you directly to our review form.
So if you click on our NT button below this story: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Indonesian_court_overturns_Garuda_pilot%27s_conv...
... you are taken directly to our review form: http://newstrust.net/stories/509516/toolbar?go=review
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.
Yeah, we figured we might as well leverage all the good work that's being done at Wikipedia, rather than reinvent the wheel ;o)
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.
We would be very happy to support any efforts along these lines, and are delighted that you find them worthwhile.
[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.
We are very happy to support your contest in any way we can, using the current NewsTrust review tools.
But we will let you guys decide how you want to calculate the final scores and award the prizes, as this is a bit outside of our area of expertise.
[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?
Our financial resources are limited, but we could perhaps give away NewsTrust mugs to the winners, if they were selected using our review tools.
The mugs have a list of the core principles of journalism on the back, so they offer more value than just promoting us ;o)
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 Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.
Fabrice,
I've whitelisted your address for posing to wikinews-l. The mailing list archives are here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
If I see any other posts from NewsTrust people I'll whitelist their email addresses too. You'll only get sent copies of other messages if you subscribe to the mailing list.
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 14:37 -0800, Fabrice Florin wrote:
Dear Brian,
It was great to speak with you yesterday - I'm glad that we got along so well, and that you are interested in working together!
Thank you so much for moving so swiftly to contact your community about a possible collaboration between NewsTrust and Wikinews.
We will discuss this idea in our editorial meeting on Monday. We really appreciate your commitment to factual reporting from a neutral perspective, and it appears that we have many shared values in common.
We are also honored that you are willing to consider using NewsTrust as a possible tool for judging the entries of participants in your upcoming writing contest (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WWC-2010). We will discuss the idea of cross-promoting this contest on both of our sites at the end of January and perhaps again in early or mid-April. A good way to do this might be to use our News Hunt format at that time, if you all find the idea interesting. Read more about our News Hunts below, as well as the attached PDF with more details about NewsTrust.
I am also delighted that you were able to install our NT review buttons so quickly on the Wikimedia article pages. Thanks, bawolff, nicely done! See my response to your comment below.
At your request, we already corrected the misspelling of your name on our source profile page for Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/sources/wikinews
Note that is is now possible for you to add one of our source widgets on your site, listing stories for review from Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/widgets?url=/sources/wikinews/for_review
I'm puzzling over where we could fit that in.
You can customize your widget in many different ways on that page (be sure to click on 'More Options') and we have many topic widgets you might consider putting next to articles that would benefit from more related stories on the same topic.
We've also started to review a couple of your featured stories, which we encourage you to review as well:
I noticed a few were up. Iain (User Blood Red Sandman) was quite pleased with the review he got on the Garuda pilot story. As you probably understand, we can have issues getting those actually involved (such as the pilot) to speak to us.
The one I put up and admitted a COI/writing involvement saw me acting as the reviewing editor, doing quite a lot of copyedit work on it and bringing it in line with house style.
(if you are a co-author of any of these articles, or have any serious conflicts of interest, please check the appropriate box in the 'About You' section of our review form, as Brian was kind enough to do for one of the articles he co-wrote)
Lastly, I also started a Smart Feed for Wikinews here, using your feedburner RSS feed: http://newstrust.net/feeds/180/show
This will make it easier for any of us to submit some of your upcoming stories from your feedburner feed, since much of your metada is automatically pulled from your feed. However, I encourage you to focus on posting some of your best stories, so we don't flood our review pipeline with too many stories from Wikinews right away.
I suspect the metadata on Feedburner is pathetic. We have an extension for MediaWiki developed to produce RSS feeds based on categories and (our) review process.
We are in the middle of a News Hunt on Climate Change, which will keep us busy through the weekend, and I have to prepare for a board meeting at the end of the week, so I will not be able to review any more stories from you guys until the following week. Thanks for your understanding. But if you have any good articles about Social Change, we would be happy to have our community review them, as that will be one of our major themes next week.
I would also like to introduce our associate editor Kaizar Campwala, who is our point person for News Hunts and partnerships. Kaizar can be reached at kaizar@newstrust.net and can answer any other questions you might have about using our service.
Look forward to continuing this discussion in coming weeks.
All the best,
Fabrice
P.S.: Do you guys know how we could encourage a Wikipedia writer to write an entry about NewsTrust on their site?
Have you independent press reports on NewsTrust? That's the key thing. There's a few Wikipedians also contribute to Wikinews, they might know if there is still a "requesting an article" page on Wikipedia (and where it's hidden).
We understand and respect Wikipedia's rules against writing entries about yourself -- or asking your friends to do it -- so we have not made any attempts to have an entry written about us to date.
But we do think that it would be reasonable for someone to write one, given all that we have contributed to this field over the years (see attached project overview).
It's all down to, unlike Wikinews, Wikipedia having a policy against original research, and being a tertiary source.
If there is a press release or two for NewsTrust then any board or other people might get their Wikipedia articles updated to reflect the position. You can go right ahead and ask for that on an article talk page as long as you disclose your interest.
Example:
"I'm XXX of NewsTrust (http://newstrust.net), this article on <someone> does not mention that he is <positionholder> at NewsTrust. This is verifiable in <link to press releases> and <links to news reports>. Can this detail be added as a redlink to [[w:NewsTrust.net]], or that article actually started? --~~~~"
Would you be willing to nudge an experienced Wikipedia writer interested in this topic to consider us as a worthy subject for an article?
I think I just did. I'll point a few other people at the mailing list archive, it might encourage them.
<snip>
Brian, to answer your question above, clicking on our NT review button on a story that has already been submitted will take you directly to our review form.
Great!
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?
We would be very happy to support any efforts along these lines, and are delighted that you find them worthwhile.
Still waiting to hear if we can pull that information off NewsTrust without having third party site requests that might violate policy.
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.
We are very happy to support your contest in any way we can, using the current NewsTrust review tools.
But we will let you guys decide how you want to calculate the final scores and award the prizes, as this is a bit outside of our area of expertise.
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?
Our financial resources are limited, but we could perhaps give away NewsTrust mugs to the winners, if they were selected using our review tools.
I don't see any reason why the mugs couldn't be awarded to the top-rated articles from the competition end-stage after submissions are closed and we're looking for those to promote to featured article status.
The mugs have a list of the core principles of journalism on the back, so they offer more value than just promoting us ;o)
I've pointed people at Kipling for that ;-)
Note, I'm 99% sure that pulling the rating data off NewsTrust using clientside js would be in violation of the wmf privacy policy (99% as i have not actually read the privacy policy...). It also represents somewhat of a security risk (the usual method of doing such things is to execute foreign javascript that inserts rating data and/or puts data in a global variable. which is generally something we try to avoid, as executing arbitrary code on the client that is not under our direct control = bad thing in my mind). With that being said, that would probably be ok as a gadget, but not ok as enabled for everyone.
However, if we were to do this, i think a better approach would be to get someone with a toolserver account to create a tool that acts as intermediatery. That way, only the toolserver is in the position to potentially collect user data.
It'd go like this: Client loads page, page asks toolserver what rating of source is, toolserver asks newstrust (possibly caching results).
I assume that'd take care of privacy issues -- - Bawolff Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 5:28 PM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
Fabrice,
I've whitelisted your address for posing to wikinews-l. The mailing list archives are here:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
If I see any other posts from NewsTrust people I'll whitelist their email addresses too. You'll only get sent copies of other messages if you subscribe to the mailing list.
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 14:37 -0800, Fabrice Florin wrote:
Dear Brian,
It was great to speak with you yesterday - I'm glad that we got along so well, and that you are interested in working together!
Thank you so much for moving so swiftly to contact your community about a possible collaboration between NewsTrust and Wikinews.
We will discuss this idea in our editorial meeting on Monday. We really appreciate your commitment to factual reporting from a neutral perspective, and it appears that we have many shared values in common.
We are also honored that you are willing to consider using NewsTrust as a possible tool for judging the entries of participants in your upcoming writing contest (http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/WN:WWC-2010). We will discuss the idea of cross-promoting this contest on both of our sites at the end of January and perhaps again in early or mid-April. A good way to do this might be to use our News Hunt format at that time, if you all find the idea interesting. Read more about our News Hunts below, as well as the attached PDF with more details about NewsTrust.
I am also delighted that you were able to install our NT review buttons so quickly on the Wikimedia article pages. Thanks, bawolff, nicely done! See my response to your comment below.
At your request, we already corrected the misspelling of your name on our source profile page for Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/sources/wikinews
Note that is is now possible for you to add one of our source widgets on your site, listing stories for review from Wikinews: http://newstrust.net/widgets?url=/sources/wikinews/for_review
I'm puzzling over where we could fit that in.
You can customize your widget in many different ways on that page (be sure to click on 'More Options') and we have many topic widgets you might consider putting next to articles that would benefit from more related stories on the same topic.
We've also started to review a couple of your featured stories, which we encourage you to review as well:
I noticed a few were up. Iain (User Blood Red Sandman) was quite pleased with the review he got on the Garuda pilot story. As you probably understand, we can have issues getting those actually involved (such as the pilot) to speak to us.
The one I put up and admitted a COI/writing involvement saw me acting as the reviewing editor, doing quite a lot of copyedit work on it and bringing it in line with house style.
(if you are a co-author of any of these articles, or have any serious conflicts of interest, please check the appropriate box in the 'About You' section of our review form, as Brian was kind enough to do for one of the articles he co-wrote)
Lastly, I also started a Smart Feed for Wikinews here, using your feedburner RSS feed: http://newstrust.net/feeds/180/show
This will make it easier for any of us to submit some of your upcoming stories from your feedburner feed, since much of your metada is automatically pulled from your feed. However, I encourage you to focus on posting some of your best stories, so we don't flood our review pipeline with too many stories from Wikinews right away.
I suspect the metadata on Feedburner is pathetic. We have an extension for MediaWiki developed to produce RSS feeds based on categories and (our) review process.
We are in the middle of a News Hunt on Climate Change, which will keep us busy through the weekend, and I have to prepare for a board meeting at the end of the week, so I will not be able to review any more stories from you guys until the following week. Thanks for your understanding. But if you have any good articles about Social Change, we would be happy to have our community review them, as that will be one of our major themes next week.
I would also like to introduce our associate editor Kaizar Campwala, who is our point person for News Hunts and partnerships. Kaizar can be reached at kaizar@newstrust.net and can answer any other questions you might have about using our service.
Look forward to continuing this discussion in coming weeks.
All the best,
Fabrice
P.S.: Do you guys know how we could encourage a Wikipedia writer to write an entry about NewsTrust on their site?
Have you independent press reports on NewsTrust? That's the key thing. There's a few Wikipedians also contribute to Wikinews, they might know if there is still a "requesting an article" page on Wikipedia (and where it's hidden).
We understand and respect Wikipedia's rules against writing entries about yourself -- or asking your friends to do it -- so we have not made any attempts to have an entry written about us to date.
But we do think that it would be reasonable for someone to write one, given all that we have contributed to this field over the years (see attached project overview).
It's all down to, unlike Wikinews, Wikipedia having a policy against original research, and being a tertiary source.
If there is a press release or two for NewsTrust then any board or other people might get their Wikipedia articles updated to reflect the position. You can go right ahead and ask for that on an article talk page as long as you disclose your interest.
Example:
"I'm XXX of NewsTrust (http://newstrust.net), this article on <someone> does not mention that he is <positionholder> at NewsTrust. This is verifiable in <link to press releases> and <links to news reports>. Can this detail be added as a redlink to [[w:NewsTrust.net]], or that article actually started? --~~~~"
Would you be willing to nudge an experienced Wikipedia writer interested in this topic to consider us as a worthy subject for an article?
I think I just did. I'll point a few other people at the mailing list archive, it might encourage them.
<snip> > > Brian, to answer your question above, clicking on our NT review button > on a story that has already been submitted will take you directly to > our review form.
Great!
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?
We would be very happy to support any efforts along these lines, and are delighted that you find them worthwhile.
Still waiting to hear if we can pull that information off NewsTrust without having third party site requests that might violate policy.
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.
We are very happy to support your contest in any way we can, using the current NewsTrust review tools.
But we will let you guys decide how you want to calculate the final scores and award the prizes, as this is a bit outside of our area of expertise.
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?
Our financial resources are limited, but we could perhaps give away NewsTrust mugs to the winners, if they were selected using our review tools.
I don't see any reason why the mugs couldn't be awarded to the top-rated articles from the competition end-stage after submissions are closed and we're looking for those to promote to featured article status.
The mugs have a list of the core principles of journalism on the back, so they offer more value than just promoting us ;o)
I've pointed people at Kipling for that ;-)
-- Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org|http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.
Wikinews-l mailing list Wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikinews-l
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 18:27 -0700, bawolff wrote:
Note, I'm 99% sure that pulling the rating data off NewsTrust using clientside js would be in violation of the wmf privacy policy (99% as i have not actually read the privacy policy...). It also represents somewhat of a security risk (the usual method of doing such things is to execute foreign javascript that inserts rating data and/or puts data in a global variable. which is generally something we try to avoid, as executing arbitrary code on the client that is not under our direct control = bad thing in my mind). With that being said, that would probably be ok as a gadget, but not ok as enabled for everyone.
However, if we were to do this, i think a better approach would be to get someone with a toolserver account to create a tool that acts as intermediatery. That way, only the toolserver is in the position to potentially collect user data.
It'd go like this: Client loads page, page asks toolserver what rating of source is, toolserver asks newstrust (possibly caching results).
I assume that'd take care of privacy issues
I do worry how much work that would impose on NewsTrust. There would need to be some sort of API on their end to serve requests up with needed data.
It would also make having a "mission critical" Toolserver box essential. I know how flaky the toolserve has historically been. We can't rely on what's there for stuff appearing in published main namespace content.
In any case, we'd need to be sending the following information to NewsTrust from the Toolserver:
article URL source name if an initial request, or periodic polling
It'd need to return
any rating they have for the article an indicator there rating is for the article the number of reviews for the article any rating they have for the source the number of reviews for the source
If a periodic polling, NewsTrust could return some sort of "no change" indicator.
This would be flexible enough that Wikinews could collect the information on our own articles and stay within the privacy policy and the WMF techies paranoia about cross-site scripting attacks.
For us using the NewsTrust review widget in the {{social bookmarks}} template Bawolff, is there any way we can pick out best-guess categories when someone submits a story? As I said, the "basic" submission from where we've got the code fails until you complete those details.
Yes, it can detect the categories (or at least be made to do so. JS looks at categories on article, maps them to category scheme for news trust, and dynamically modifies url of button). I'll try to add that some point in the near future.
Ideally if we did use the toolserver as an intermediary, it'd cache responses, so not to overload newstrust (and script on wikinews end would fail gracefully if toolserver has downtime). -- - Bawolff Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 18:27 -0700, bawolff wrote:
Note, I'm 99% sure that pulling the rating data off NewsTrust using clientside js would be in violation of the wmf privacy policy (99% as i have not actually read the privacy policy...). It also represents somewhat of a security risk (the usual method of doing such things is to execute foreign javascript that inserts rating data and/or puts data in a global variable. which is generally something we try to avoid, as executing arbitrary code on the client that is not under our direct control = bad thing in my mind). With that being said, that would probably be ok as a gadget, but not ok as enabled for everyone.
However, if we were to do this, i think a better approach would be to get someone with a toolserver account to create a tool that acts as intermediatery. That way, only the toolserver is in the position to potentially collect user data.
It'd go like this: Client loads page, page asks toolserver what rating of source is, toolserver asks newstrust (possibly caching results).
I assume that'd take care of privacy issues
I do worry how much work that would impose on NewsTrust. There would need to be some sort of API on their end to serve requests up with needed data.
It would also make having a "mission critical" Toolserver box essential. I know how flaky the toolserve has historically been. We can't rely on what's there for stuff appearing in published main namespace content.
In any case, we'd need to be sending the following information to NewsTrust from the Toolserver:
article URL source name if an initial request, or periodic polling
It'd need to return
any rating they have for the article an indicator there rating is for the article the number of reviews for the article any rating they have for the source the number of reviews for the source
If a periodic polling, NewsTrust could return some sort of "no change" indicator.
This would be flexible enough that Wikinews could collect the information on our own articles and stay within the privacy policy and the WMF techies paranoia about cross-site scripting attacks.
For us using the NewsTrust review widget in the {{social bookmarks}} template Bawolff, is there any way we can pick out best-guess categories when someone submits a story? As I said, the "basic" submission from where we've got the code fails until you complete those details.
-- Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org|http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.
[Refactored because top-posting is evil.]
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Brian McNeil wrote:
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 18:27 -0700, bawolff wrote:
It'd go like this: Client loads page, page asks toolserver what rating of source is, toolserver asks newstrust (possibly caching results).
Reminder: I'm wanting the url parameter and publisher name sent to NewsTrust. Ideally Wikinews is displaying the sourced-from article's rating. If they don't have one, or a very small number of reviews, it falls back to the publisher's more general rating. We do want to pick out where a normally good publisher spits out a dud.
I assume that'd take care of privacy issues
I do worry how much work that would impose on NewsTrust. There would need to be some sort of API on their end to serve requests up with needed data.
It would also make having a "mission critical" Toolserver box essential. I know how flaky the toolserve has historically been. We can't rely on what's there for stuff appearing in published main namespace content.
In any case, we'd need to be sending the following information to NewsTrust from the Toolserver:
article URL source name if an initial request, or periodic polling
It'd need to return
any rating they have for the article an indicator there rating is for the article the number of reviews for the article any rating they have for the source the number of reviews for the source
If a periodic polling, NewsTrust could return some sort of "no change" indicator.
This would be flexible enough that Wikinews could collect the information on our own articles and stay within the privacy policy and the WMF techies paranoia about cross-site scripting attacks.
Ideally if we did use the toolserver as an intermediary, it'd cache responses, so not to overload newstrust (and script on wikinews end would fail gracefully if toolserver has downtime).
I'm factoring in an "unchanged" response instead of a large blob of XML. This way we can minimise the load put on NewsTrust and keep the data current. I don't want too long a delay between someone reviewing an article on NewsTrust and that being reflected anywhere the data is displayed on Wikinews. It encourages readers both to look at these things on NewsTrust *and* to check Wikinews articles more than once.
A last point I'd be really keen to go over with Kul in the office is how the Foundation itself, as opposed to a semi-independent project effort, could partner with NewsTrust. Few points on that:
The Wikinews logo is a registered mark. NewsTrust could use it under fair-use provisions but an actual in-writing agreement would be far, far better - and more *transparent*.
The Foundation has, as far as I know, done a few select deals with the Wikipedia logo. If I recall correctly, one of the Spanish ISPs has a deal to do a portal into Wikipedia content. I think that would involve private data sharing. Can a similar deal be drawn up with NewsWire? Is it, perhaps, just as simple as specific clauses in NewsTrust's privacy policy and terms of use?
Hi guys,
I have added our web engineer Subbu Sastry to this thread, as he would know whether or not it's feasible for us to give you this data.
We don't yet have a full API, though our widgets function a bit like an API.
One new widget we have been considering is a rating widget which a third-party could put on their site, to show the NT story rating for a particular story on that site. It might also be possible to show the source rating we have for that source, if known. We hadn't planned on doing this right away, but it's in the queue of things we would consider doing, if requested by one of our partners.
Your request seems a bit different, if I understand it correctly: you would want to display the ratings for sources cited by your articles, is that right? if that's the case, it may be sufficient for us to get just the URL. We would then look up that URL in our DB, and if we have it on file, that would allow us to provide the story rating and number of reviews. We may also be able to provide the source rating and number of reviews for the source associated with that story at the same time. Lastly, it may be possible to provide the source rating and reviews for the source typically associated with that domain name, though this is a risky proposition, because often a story featured on a site is not really from that site. So it would be best to ask for source ratings by specifying a source name, but you would need to request the exact name we use for that source, which could be prone to human error.
In any case, we should probably prioritize the tasks you are considering, so we know which is most important to you from an editorial standpoint.
Is it more important for you to have your own articles display a story rating? or to give a rating to the third-party articles cited as sources for your own articles?
If it's the latter, how often would you need this information to be updated? If it's an old story, its story rating is unlikely to change much after a month or two after its release, so maybe you could settle for a one-time rating -- the source rating is more likely to change over time, but not by much. So maybe a once-a-month or less frequent update might be fine.
Either way, we would need to figure out how important all this is to you, and if we can squeeze in some simple technology that addresses most of your needs.
But this is a good conversation to have, and we appreciate your thinking about these creative uses of NewsTrust for your site.
Thanks again,
Fabrice
On Dec 12, 2009, at 6:02 PM, bawolff wrote:
Yes, it can detect the categories (or at least be made to do so. JS looks at categories on article, maps them to category scheme for news trust, and dynamically modifies url of button). I'll try to add that some point in the near future.
Ideally if we did use the toolserver as an intermediary, it'd cache responses, so not to overload newstrust (and script on wikinews end would fail gracefully if toolserver has downtime). --
- Bawolff
Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 18:27 -0700, bawolff wrote:
Note, I'm 99% sure that pulling the rating data off NewsTrust using clientside js would be in violation of the wmf privacy policy (99% as i have not actually read the privacy policy...). It also represents somewhat of a security risk (the usual method of doing such things is to execute foreign javascript that inserts rating data and/or puts data in a global variable. which is generally something we try to avoid, as executing arbitrary code on the client that is not under our direct control = bad thing in my mind). With that being said, that would probably be ok as a gadget, but not ok as enabled for everyone.
However, if we were to do this, i think a better approach would be to get someone with a toolserver account to create a tool that acts as intermediatery. That way, only the toolserver is in the position to potentially collect user data.
It'd go like this: Client loads page, page asks toolserver what rating of source is, toolserver asks newstrust (possibly caching results).
I assume that'd take care of privacy issues
I do worry how much work that would impose on NewsTrust. There would need to be some sort of API on their end to serve requests up with needed data.
It would also make having a "mission critical" Toolserver box essential. I know how flaky the toolserve has historically been. We can't rely on what's there for stuff appearing in published main namespace content.
In any case, we'd need to be sending the following information to NewsTrust from the Toolserver:
article URL source name if an initial request, or periodic polling
It'd need to return
any rating they have for the article an indicator there rating is for the article the number of reviews for the article any rating they have for the source the number of reviews for the source
If a periodic polling, NewsTrust could return some sort of "no change" indicator.
This would be flexible enough that Wikinews could collect the information on our own articles and stay within the privacy policy and the WMF techies paranoia about cross-site scripting attacks.
For us using the NewsTrust review widget in the {{social bookmarks}} template Bawolff, is there any way we can pick out best-guess categories when someone submits a story? As I said, the "basic" submission from where we've got the code fails until you complete those details.
-- Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org|http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or any of its projects.
[Erik Moeller dropped from CC list; no response to any emails over past week on these issues.]
On Sat, 2009-12-12 at 18:39 -0800, Fabrice Florin wrote:
Hi guys,
I have added our web engineer Subbu Sastry to this thread, as he would know whether or not it's feasible for us to give you this data.
Hi Subbu!
Wikinews has a few techies who hack things together for the site. Bawolff specialises in Javascript with unusual exception errors containing creative spelling mistakes. I'm going to suggest one of his widgets for NewsTrust (later), I think you and Fabrice will both quite like it.
We've also Jon (ShakataGaNai) who helps with a number of other coding things. Some less-noticeable people also help with other bits and pieces.
Personally I've little experience with developing server-side things like a web API; but, does 20+ years as a systems analyst help? Mostly working on Billing Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning, I did do some XML-spewing designs for that. I'd probably have no problems with looking at your database structures and identifying the information I think most useful to expose in an API. Happy to drop Fabrice and some of the other CC'd people from that discussion. If there's a need for a non-disclosure agreement to get at such data it won't be the first time I've signed one.
We don't yet have a full API, though our widgets function a bit like an API.
One new widget we have been considering is a rating widget which a third-party could put on their site, to show the NT story rating for a particular story on that site. It might also be possible to show the source rating we have for that source, if known. We hadn't planned on doing this right away, but it's in the queue of things we would consider doing, if requested by one of our partners.
I'd say the advantage of an API is the scripts for your widgets should be greatly simplified, and you can freely license examples of them.
The drawback is you'll want to do various logs and analyses on API usage so you can block any particularly abusive sites; just like web spiders that don't respect robots.txt end up blocked everywhere except SEO linkbuilder sites.
Your request seems a bit different, if I understand it correctly: you would want to display the ratings for sources cited by your articles, is that right? if that's the case, it may be sufficient for us to get just the URL. We would then look up that URL in our DB, and if we have it on file, that would allow us to provide the story rating and number of reviews. We may also be able to provide the source rating and number of reviews for the source associated with that story at the same time. Lastly, it may be possible to provide the source rating and reviews for the source typically associated with that domain name, though this is a risky proposition, because often a story featured on a site is not really from that site. So it would be best to ask for source ratings by specifying a source name, but you would need to request the exact name we use for that source, which could be prone to human error.
Yes. At the moment there's a significant percentage of Wikinews articles are what we call "synthesis" articles. They contain no original research, but are constructed through using multiple independent sources which must be listed at the foot of the article.
Within the Wikicode this looks as follows:
*{{source|url=http://news.example.com/articleurl |title=Name of story, as given by publisher |author=the article's author(s), if specified by the publisher |pub=The name of the publisher. This *should* be as listed on Wikipedia |date=Monthname daynumber, year - as specified by the publisher}}
This was one point another contributor raised off-list; we currently list all used sources with no regard to their reliability or reputation. That can see Fox News listed and "supposedly" on a par with the BBC, Reuters, or PBS. Your own critique of Iain's article on the Garuda pilot's conviction noted we'd not had contact with some key primary sources; as independents, with zero financial backing for our reporting activities, getting that can be challenging. International phone calls can soon mount up if you're looking for comment from the other side of the globe. Personally, I've sunk between €500-€1,000 into setting up our wikinewsie.org domain, mostly used so we're not emailing people with addresses like "fluffykitteh1024@hotspace.com".
In any case, we should probably prioritize the tasks you are considering, so we know which is most important to you from an editorial standpoint.
I don't want to end up pushing NewsTrust to develop something that would have limited use outside that of Wikinews. However, I do think that the elimination of cross-server scripting vulnerabilities would be a big selling point for a published API.
Is it more important for you to have your own articles display a story rating? or to give a rating to the third-party articles cited as sources for your own articles?
Both, I think. But, that's the beauty of doing it with an API; anyone could do either.
If it's the latter, how often would you need this information to be updated? If it's an old story, its story rating is unlikely to change much after a month or two after its release, so maybe you could settle for a one-time rating -- the source rating is more likely to change over time, but not by much. So maybe a once-a-month or less frequent update might be fine.
Bawolff's input on this suggests the volume of requests to NewsTrust would naturally tail off as articles age. Thus:
* Someone request a Wikinews article. * Javascript on Wikinews activates, parses required parameters from the source template, and sends them to our back end (the ToolServer). * If less than 10-15 minutes since NewsTrust last queried, back end returns cached data. * Else the back end submits a new request * If NewsTrust returns updated data (instead of an "unchanged" response) the back end updates its stats and sends that on to the reader via the Javascript invoked above
Either way, we would need to figure out how important all this is to you, and if we can squeeze in some simple technology that addresses most of your needs.
As you've mentioned, and one of the other headaches we have, something from AP, Reuters, or AFP can end up on dozens - if not hundreds - of newspaper sites. Wikinews tends to push for people to go back to the wire site or, say, Google News' hosting of these. We also push for the wire to be cited as the author (eg Reuters); that *might* help NewsTrust consolidate the different URLs because the article title is generally only changed if the site publishing it applies a house style for capitalisation.
If, perhaps as a more long-term goal for NewsTrust, you were getting that data you could tie up all the different URLs for a Reuters or AP story, group under a unique article identifier, and expose that in the API so, once you've queried with a URL, the API asks for future requests to use a much shorter identifier.
But this is a good conversation to have, and we appreciate your thinking about these creative uses of NewsTrust for your site.
I did warn you Wikinewsies will steal anything that isn't nailed down and watched by armed guards. :-P
Oh, and the widget I said I'd suggest:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-dictionaryLookupHover.js
Subbu will likely follow this most quickly; it's a freely licensed piece of Javascript that uses Wiktionary (another WMF project) to do a dictionary lookup of any work a user double clicks on.
It is multilingual, so if NewsTrust account holders could set a "Mother tongue" option they wouldn't get definitions in an English default, but their chosen language. (The gadget looks up "example" in Wiktionary, tracks down the link to the definition in "Mother tongue", and displays it in a small pop-up window.)
If you'd like to try it out on Wikinews, sign up for an account, log in, select your preferences at the top of the page, go to the gadgets tab, and look for and enable Wiktionary Hover.
Here endeth another shameless plug for Bawolff's Javascript-fu.
wikinews-l@lists.wikimedia.org