User:Brian McNeil/Google News

This is a rough guide to what's required to get a language version of Wikinews indexed by Google News.


 * 1) You must have "editorial control"
 * 2) You must provide a sitemap of to-be-indexed articles, or have each appear on the main page
 * 3) If using the main page, each article URL must have a four or five digitnumber within it

Editorial control is achieved with the Flagged Revisions extension. Here on enwn each article must be reviewed by an independent editor before publication. At this point, an article passing review is marked as published and "sighted" (marked as okay using FlaggedRevs).

The Dynamic Page List extension has been enhanced to work with Flagged Revisions. Within a DPL you can specify "stablepages=only"; this means only articles "sighted" by an editor will be listed in the DPL.

Enwn's main page uses two templates containing DPLS:
 * 1) Main headlines - Which produces the article list down the right of the main page
 * 2) Main google news - which is a "hidden" list indexed by Google
 * This list picks up special redirects in the main namespace created for GNews to index (a "dirty fix")

Reviewing is by those with the "editor" user right - WN:EDITOR - This is never automatically granted, as is done on the dewp FlaggedRevs setup, instead it must be requested once you've demonstrated to the community you know the policy. Administrators can grant this privilege to themselves, as well as anyone else, so I've always said that repeat abuse/misuse by an admin would be grounds to seek desysopping.

To actually do the review, enwn has set up a template - peer review. The parameters to fill in are pretty straightforward, but there's also a gadget for it which is very helpful. The "Easy Peer Review" gadget (see user preferences) allows automation of the review process and completion of the template. On failure, it puts an appropriate cleanup template on the article page. On successful review, it puts the publish template on the article, sights the page, and - as a "for-now" quick-fix, creates a main namespace redirect with the needed numbers in it, sights that, then it appears in the Main google news template which gets indexed.