Wikinews:Wikinews Bulletin/2007-1/Community mirror proposal for Google searches

New community mirror established

 * By Brian NZ, June 11, 2007

Craig Spurrier has set up a community mirror to bring our stories to Google News..

In the past Google news has been unwilling to index wikinews because wikinews has no editorial approval process and concerns over vandalism. However several sites who mirror wikinews have been included in the index for Google News. It has been proposed several times that wikinews creates a community run mirror, however each attempt at this has failed, the last attempt, on wikinews.blogspot.com failing due having to manually copying each article, was very tedious.

Craig set up a site, http://thenewswiki.com/ and has written a script that will copy an article on click and easily report the status of the article (is stored revision the latest) and prompt user to update if needed.

Wikinews admins can create an account at http://thenewswiki.com/adduser.php and logging in at http://thenewswiki.com/login.php

Wikinewsises are now working out an 'editorial policy', containing a clear set of rules when to upload stories from Wikinews.

Full text rss feeds have been proposed, along with a better design, so that the site looks more like a conventional news site, instead of just a list of articles. It has been proposed adding: Wikinews Weather Maps, Latest audio brief, print edition, This day in history, News in pictures, The list of what we can do is endless, and growing by the day.

Also this fortnight (May 28 — June 11): From the editor • Sean Heron at G8 • Weather BETA Community mirror proposal • Cascading protection • Administrators and accreditations • Featured content