[Wikinews-l] Wikinews in Google News

[Brian McNeil]

NB! This email is CC'd to several people who have requested parts of
Flagged Revisions be enabled on various Wikinews language versions. I
would urge these recipients to subscribe to wikinews-l.

I would like to see so as many language versions of Wikinews as possible
listed in Google News. Erik Moeller, WMF Deputy CEO, graciously put me
in touch with someone who helped make it happen for English Wikinews, as
far as I can tell it should be possible for

English
French
Hungarian
Polish 
Portuguese
Spanish

There are processes that need to be visible to Google and assure them of
certain editorial controls, and at the moment there are some technical
kludges required to meet other requirements laid out by Google.

For technical issues, some work is being done on a new MediaWiki
extension:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20818

Hopefully Amgine will have another patch on offer soon, but I encourage
all Wikinewsies to vote for this bug.

For non-English Wikinews editions, I'm happy to try and help get
appropriate pages interlinked and presented to Google as proof of
editorial control. Bawolff can also help with some of the technical
measures and helper tools.

Ideally, given the six languages above, Google News could list us in a
special way where a story is covered in several languages.

I would also like to see the upcoming Writing contest
( http://enwn.net/WC2010 ) expanded to languages that can get a Google
News listing before the start date. This might encourage Google to
sponsor a prize or two in light of having to implement measures to limit
public access to certain newspaper websites.



-- 
Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org>|http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Brian_McNeil
Content of this message in no way represents the opinions or official position
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