Wikinews:Water cooler/technical: Difference between revisions

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I've done new templates for the top-level regional portals (Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania, and South America). They've been done to be a very close derivative of the main page. You may need to do a hard refresh to get the title suppression to kick-in.

What doing this highlighted is that some would only list one article in the headlines section until Category:Archived was excluded from the criteria on the DPL. I then proceeded to waste time trying to differentiate archived from non-archived.

Here's what I would like:

1. The ability to ask a DPL how many results it will return. (Eg.|mode=count and an integer is returned, not a list of articles.)
2. The list of (currently 15) articles made up from two DPLs; C and A, where the number of articles in C+A is 15. Articles in the A DPL be displayed in a slightly different colour.
3. The C+A functionality implemented on the main page; in this way, the bottom of a headlines list is faded for the archived articles.

Have prodded Bawolff on the count articles issue; but, dendodge is working on other portal/main page proposals. However, feedback on what's done to-date would be welcome. For example, what do people think of having a very faded region map as a background image on these pages? Or, where I've just snagged, and embedded, the existing lists of countries, what other ideas can people come up with for that part of the page?

You'll also notice I've switched to the new RSS form using Special:NewsFeed (). --Brian McNeil / ^talk 03:18, 30 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

This bug to get the HEAD of pages tweaked to feed out relevant feeds could do with votes. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 03:22, 30 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

These types of things are done much faster with community concensuss. So if you support this (Changing the rss feed from the off site one to special:newsfeed - please {{support}}). (New feed does the lesser of last 30 articles or articles published in last 96 hours (minus the standard disputed/archived/etc cats). Old one did whatever was on T:LN which was a very similar dpl )

• Support Bawolff ☺☻ 15:41, 31 August 2011 (UTC)Reply
• Support the wub "?!" 17:36, 31 August 2011 (UTC)Reply
• Support although, I thought it was votes on the bug were important. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 17:42, 31 August 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • • Depends on the type of bug - for shell bugs, votes on bugzilla probably aren't even looked at (other types of bugs, they're sometimes looked at, but really not super much). By and large shell bugs consist of large numbers of trivial but time consuming configuration changes. Most of the time people closing those types of bugs just want to make sure that once they fix it they won't have an angry mob on their hand complaining they didn't want it fixed. Bawolff ☺☻ 07:55, 1 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
• Oppose The less useful GNSM is, the happier I will be. I'd rather it not be here at all, but so be it, we're stuck with it. No votes from my BZ account :) BarkingFish (talk) 20:03, 31 August 2011 (UTC)Reply

• Did you even read the bugzilla filing? The primary purpose of this is for us to have an accurate, onsite, RSS feed. I don't know what your beef with Google News, or the Google News Site Map is; this is just childishness – Wikinews content needs all the exposure it can get. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 20:44, 31 August 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • You must be about the only person who doesn't know what my beef with GNSM is, the fact that it started the slippery slope towards the possibility of self publishing - I made that abundantly clear during the discussions here on GNSM. Using their RSS feed is just another part of the involvement. There are other places I'm sure where we could get a feed besides tying ourselves in even further with Google. Screw them. BarkingFish (talk) 12:33, 1 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

Nobody, that I'm aware of, actively advocates full-blown self-publishing. Remember, I was here when there was nothing but self-publish; the current review process is frequently too onerous, but I'd not advocate a return to the old free-for-all. What use of GNSM does, at the moment, is mean if someone publishes with a typo in a title, that can be corrected without two copies of the article appearing in GNews. What this shell change does, most importantly, is stop us relying on a hack to put our RSS feed on feedburner - instead seeing it running locally.

It does mean we could turn one of the sections on the main page over to a list of developing articles without those being assumed to be "genuine" news. But, that's a discussion for another day. --Brian McNeil / ^talk 15:32, 1 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

The claim that 'nobody I'm aware of actively advocates full-blown self-publishing' is troubling, and opens up a wide vista of wildly unproductive discussion.

While I like the improved articulation of our GNews feed (and each of these others), it bothers me that the only thing between us and pushing a completely messed up feed to GNews (or wherever) is the correct functioning of a hairy call to Special:NewsFeed over which we have no direct control at all (neither direct control of the hairy call, nor direct control of Special:NewsFeed). --Pi zero (talk) 20:53, 1 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

Just to clarify some points: This has nothing to do with google. This is just proposing we make the rss feed that web browsers link to in the address bar with the icon for Live_bookmark like features be one based on http://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=special:newsfeed&feed=atom instead of http://feeds.feedburner.com/WikinewsLatestNews (To be technical, the one we advertise in the <link> tag in the page source) . There's a number of reasons why we'd want to do that.

1. It looks much more professional to have an rss feed on the same domain as the main website
2. We can fix special:newsfeed if it breaks much more easily. Special:newsfeed is part of MediaWiki which we (or the devs anyways) have fairly direct control over. The old feedburner feed can break randomly (like it did a couple months ago), and we have to talk to CSpurrier to fix it who isn't very active anymore (single point of failure). If for example someone forgets to pay the hosting for http://thenewswiki.com/wn/wnfeed.xml we wouldn't know wtf happened.
3. Feedburner is owned by google. Anytime anybody goes to a news story from our current rss feed, google is notified which story they're going to (possibly correlated with your google account). This is kind of scary from a privacy perspective to our users

Bawolff ☺☻ 14:17, 5 September 2011 (UTC)Reply

• Support Blood Red Sandman ^{(Talk) (Contribs)} 19:29, 1 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
• Support—the objection(s) to this (is|are) frivolous. An on-site RSS/Atom feed would be a major improvement over the buggy, hacky, Feedburner one we have now. GNSM works, and rejecting one use of something on the basis that the extension that enables it would perhaps allow for us to maybe one day institute a policy you don't much like is, frankly, dumb. DENDODGE George Watson 23:49, 1 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
  • Dumb, maybe. But my objections to the existence and use of GNSM and anything related to it have been blatantly obvious since I first found out about it. As far as I'm concerned, the extension and anything which it uses, can go burn in hell. Google are a bloodsucking parasite on the face of the internet, and I will do nothing which supports them in any way. It's obvious nobody is going to give a flying fuck what I say, so frankly, who cares? BarkingFish (talk) 16:01, 5 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
    • But the RSS feeds are not related to Google. If there were an extension that gave us the pretty RSS feeds, but didn't have Google in its name, would you support it? GNSM is already here, so we might as well make the most of it. DENDODGE George Watson 16:05, 5 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
      • So correct me if my English is failing me, but the title of that bug - "Set $wgSiteFeed['rss'] to use the new Special:NewsFeed from GNSM on English Wikinews" - implies that we're using GNSM's Newsfeed, right? I must be getting confused here - somebody explain this to me properly, since the title of the bug says one thing, and I'm obviously understanding something entirely fucking different. BarkingFish (talk) 16:10, 5 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
        • The Special:NewsFeed page can be used to create a Google News Sitemap. But in this instance, it's being used to create an RSS/Atom feed. It would be relatively trivial to create a version of the extension that only does RSS, but that would mean duplicating various pieces of code for the sitemap (because the community, except you, wants it). If this were an extension called PrettyRSS that didn't do Google News sitemaps, would you support it? And, if so, why not support it in this case, since opposing this is not going to do anything to affect the Google News sitemap, which is - as I understand - what you object to? DENDODGE George Watson 16:15, 5 September 2011 (UTC)Reply
          • If it's not going to do anything with Google, or interact with it, or affect GNSM in any way, I'm all over it like chickenpox in a kindergarten. And in answer to your question, I wouldn't care what it was called as long as it had F.A to do with the Googlemonster. BarkingFish (talk) 16:21, 5 September 2011 (UTC)Reply