Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2013/July

Universal Language Selector will be enabled on 2013-07-09

On July 9, 2013, Universal Language Selector (ULS) will be enabled on this wiki. The ULS provides a flexible way to configure and deliver language settings like interface language, fonts, and input methods (keyboard mappings). Making it available here is the last phase of making ULS available on all Wikimedia wikis.

Please read the announcement on Meta-Wiki for more information. Siebrand 12:21, 4 July 2013 (UTC) (via User:PiRSquared17).

Comment from deliverer: this was listed on m:Global_message_delivery/Targets/ULS_Phase_5. I guess Technical > Miscellaneous for this one.

Sitemapping

After Bawolff made a brief appearance on #wikinews, I've edited MediaWiki:robots.txt and see 'some' improvements with GNews.

It looks to me as-if the other languages make similar changes they may improve their Google News placement. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 10:04, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Having given this a day to bed in, I've done some testing against Google News.

1. Tried to find the main lead with "montreal mayor arrested"; we're buried, but in the results. To verify, add " source:wikinews" to the Google News query.
2. Second lead is a much-better example; a simple GNews search of "sunshine coast rugby" shows our article as the 3rd result.
3. I'm not even going to bother with the Duke of Edinburgh leaving hospital, straight to "Duke of Edinburgh source:wikinews" as the search.
4. The "Stornoway" story does have us on the 1st page of results just now, might need to add more as time goes by.
5. "Gubernatorial candidate Tancredo" has us sitting right at the top of that search - the featured article out of 16 sources.

What is most-noticeable from this is it pretty much backs-up what I - and - presumably, others know/guessed:

• {{Original}} reporting is almost always going to be a good result.

  I also suspect the GoogleBot is smart enough to 'learn' that when the tag is on a report, we consider it more valuable/important. If that, consistently, matches its other criteria, it may start to weight {{Original}} itself.

• If you cover a story the mainstream is 'Churnalising', it is not going to get many (any?) hits via GNews.

  Much of the mainstream are lazy about this; they'll simply buy, and republish, the wire report. If they go much further, it's not by much.

I think that's a representative-enough set of results to look at a serious discussion about the "content priorities" for Wikinews. Apart from what I'd hope everyone else might see in these results, I've at least one 'radical' suggestion.

Please, feel free to add additional results as new articles are published. Remember bots run through the sitemap periodically, so you may want to capture Publication +1hr, +3hr, +6hr, +12hr.

And, those who may know folks on other languages might want to point them at this discussion and get them to check they've all the right settings. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 19:55, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

• Bawolff commented on IRC that, 'the URLs served up by Google News' are the same as from the DPL on the main page. Those match the GNews rules that all URLs should contain a numeric element. However, it is the presence of the Sitemap: entries in robots.txt which tells GNews these articles are news. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 06:31, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Actually I suspect the sitemap doesn't work properly. If it was working we would see urls without the numeric number (The benefit of the sitemap is supposed to be that you're not required to twist your url scheme to meet googles needs). There's a problem with the urls in the current sitemap, which should get fixed soon (scheduled for july 15) which may help the situation. Bawolff ☺☻ 22:06, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

Dialog tools update

My intended initial set of tools is now fully deployed, and an overview provided at Help:Wndialog. Next I start designing an article wizard using the tools, in awareness practical experience building the article wizard may indicate design adjustments to the tools. --Pi zero (talk) 23:09, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

I've applied the tools to provide a button for scrolling a latest-articles DPL. Demonstrated at Category:Australia. --Pi zero (talk) 00:12, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Pywikipedia is migrating to git

Hello, Sorry for English but It's very important for bot operators so I hope someone translates this. Pywikipedia is migrating to Git so after July 26, SVN checkouts won't be updated If you're using Pywikipedia you have to switch to git, otherwise you will use out-dated framework and your bot might not work properly. There is a manual for doing that and a blog post explaining about this change in non-technical language. If you have question feel free to ask in mw:Manual talk:Pywikipediabot/Gerrit, mailing list, or in the IRC channel. Best Amir (via User:PiRSquared17). 13:08, 23 July 2013 (UTC)