[Foundation-l] wikinews feature

[Ilya Haykinson]

On 10/31/05, James R. Johnson <modean52 at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hey,
>     Is there a feature on the wikis that allows you to have auto-updated
> stock information, much like the weather maps on wikinews?
>

I've originally developed a tool to do this on English Wikinews. The
output was auto-edited by a bot, with images hosted on the Commons,
with the results located at http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Market_Data

I stopped running the bot for three reasons:

1) This type of work should really be server-side and not performed by
a bot editing pages and uploading images every few hours
2) The data source wasn't very stable and consistent
3) The license for the data was questioned

Please note that the biggest issue is the source of the data -- as far
as I know, there's no free service that provides international stock
market data unencumbered by restrictions on data reuse. If someone
with more time could find a good source for the data, I could
doubtlessly start running that bot again. Or if someone wants to write
this tool server-side (as an extension to MediaWiki or whatnot) we'd
be in an even better shape.

-ilya haykinson