Giving Wikinews Feeds
One of the ideas tossed around at the Wikinews chat on Saturday was giving Wikinews feeds. Dan100 is now posting Wikinews items to a Blogger blog with a native Atom feed and an RSS feed via Feedburner.
This is a great first step, but it seems silly not to mix feeds and wikis. Maybe one day, Wikinews will have its own native feed(s) and wikis with feeds won’t be so rare.
It’s interesting how most of us talking about Wikinews and feeds seem to be focusing on getting news to the consumers, not to other journalists. Many journalists use feeds and aggregators. Certainly Wikinews’ feeds would be valuable to journalists to get story ideas. Maybe the day will come when news organizations will repurpose Wikinews’ content. Maybe that’s already happening.
Imagine the power of Wikinews having one of those feed to HTML/Javascript converters people can use and providing the exact code someone should use on their site in order to put Wikinews headlines on it, like what Kansas City infoZine does. Once the tools are in place, Wikimedia could use them in other areas. Doing something similar for Wikipedia or Wiktionary would rock.
February 10th, 2005 at 12:48 pm
Just to clarify, I’m not ’selecting’ Wikinews stories. I’m blogging ALL articles that are published on the Latest news template (effectively the front page of the English Wikinews). I do this as often as I can – once at around 7am UTC, and then as soon as I see anything new 5pm – 10pm UTC (the times I have ‘net access).
The blog posts consist of nothing more than a direct link to the article, and I only use the given article title (ie I do no editing).
BTW the site feed is now running through FeedBurner, so should work in any aggregator system. The blogposts also have Haloscan comments and TrackBacks. I don’t advise using the comments – use the Talk page of an article if you want to make comments – but feel free to use the TrackBack links.
February 10th, 2005 at 12:49 pm
PS the blog is at http://wikinewslatestnews.blogspot.com/
February 10th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
Got it.
I was told by someone else it wasn’t everything, just selected articles. I’ll correct my text.
Thanks, Dan100!
February 12th, 2005 at 1:41 pm
whay hey, a blogger who reads their comments
. Thanks for changing your post!
February 12th, 2005 at 3:25 pm
Oh yeah, I read my blog’s comments. Sometimes I act on them, too. Not only am I actually interested in what people say/think about what I’ve posted, but it’s a great way to nip comment spam in the bud. = )
I tried to find details about the weblog on Wikinews, but I looked in the completely wrong places.
Perhaps some of you might be interested in an upcoming Webcast about The Vanishing Newspaper on March 9. It sounds like it’ll be about how news-reading habits of people have changed. Details & links: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/2005/02/10#a3055.
February 12th, 2005 at 8:07 pm
Thanks for the tip!
I haven’t put a link to the RSS feed on Wikinews itself yet as it’s quite interesting to see how news of it is worming its way through the blogosphere (I’m monitoring stats on readers of the feed and hits on the blog), but I’ll add one shortly.