[Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us?

[Brian McNeil]

The use of a blog is not helping promote Wikinews. It has a pitiful pagerank
compared to the main site and unless you hit on a lot of words in an article
title it appears well down the results list.

The same issue would impact any separate "stable" site, a sub-page less so.

I'm sure there are others on-list who have a far better understanding of the
ins and outs of pagerank and other search engine's ranking methods but as I
understand it Wikinews gains a lot from crosslinking with Wikipedia whereas
we might lose this if we're using a static site.


Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew
Whitworth
Sent: 16 December 2007 17:42
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Is popularity a good thing for us?

> First, Google requires an indexing number within the news item URL, IIRC 5
> digits or more. This - to my way of thinking - would be best met by
serving
> up a URL containing the flagged revision's id. If a non-logged in user
> requests this page and a later version is currently flagged a supercedes
> header should be returned to the browser.
>
> Second, from looking at the test wiki for F.R. it seems the usual
> configuration is you can't flag until you have a certain edit count, and
> been on-wiki for a certain time. This isn't appropriate for an editorial
> review team. We have a number of people who I'd trust fully with the
buttons
> on their home language, but not on en. where it is their 3rd or 4th
> language. Everyone on the editorial team would meet these criteria, but
not
> everyone meeting these criteria should be on the editorial team.

These are both compelling reasons for a separate website, or a
separate section of the existing wikinews website, should be created.
Think of Veropedia as a guide for this. You create news stories
on-wiki at Wikinews, and then you move them over to the static
website, after they have been properly checked. This is similar to how
Wikinews currently uses a blog that must be manually updated to show
the most current wikinews stories. The list of people with upload
access to the static site would be small, and likely selected by the
community directly (as opposed to simple technical requirements).

Once hosted in a separate place, they could be given indexing numbers,
properly forwarded to the correct locations, etc.

--Andrew Whitworth

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