Category:Wikinews

Oh, didn't look at DynamicPageList yet. This should be worked into the following idea, if appropriate.

Question: How do Wikinews and Semantic MediaWiki fit together?

[edit] Advantages for Wikinews

The content in the portals can be pulled together from the articles and the articles' metadata instead of having to enter the data in possibly several places manually. Example: both the main page as well as the Asia portal could show the most relevant news about Asia, without having to resort to complicated and manually edited templates. Instead, a query will be put in the appropriate places.

[edit] Structure

Every news story is represented by one article. Articles have semantic attributes and relations, linking them to topics (via [[has topic::Politics]], places ([[is about::Brasil]] or ([[is about::Sao Paolo]], with the wiki knowing that Sao Paolo is in [[located in::Brasil]]), and thus being able to check on the Brasil portal not only for all news in Brasil, but also for all news in Brasilian cities), or people (([[is about::Dick Cheney]]), but also things like relevance ([[relevance:=5]] -- let's assume a scale of 1 to 5, similar to the biography project in Wikipedia, with 5 being the most relevant), time ([[time:=October 2, 2006, 14:12 GMT]]) or source ([[source::Reuters]]).

News stories without these semantic information will still be possible, but naturally will not appear in the queries. But it would be easy to check for such news stories and to add the information later.

Also, the given structure is only a proposal, to show the possibilities of the system. It would be surprising if the community would not come up with a different, and much more refined to their needs structure.

The portal pages would contain further basic knowledge on the topic being discussed, so that some basic queries are possible. The portal page on a country for example would contain the continent it is located in, a football club would link to the city it is hosted in, etc. This is not required for the Semantic Wikinews to work, but enables a few powerful extra features that are described below.

[edit] Queries

Now the main page could include queries, that automatically include the most recent stories, for example a simple overview of the 10 top relevant, most recent stories, with a query like (<ask sort="time" limit="10">[[relevance:=5]]</ask>. It could further create headings and sections, like an Asia section, where additionally all further Asia stories with a high relevance are listed (<ask sort="time" limit="5">[[concerns::Asia]] [[relevance:=4]]</ask>).

The Asia portal itself, on the other hand, would include, besides a list of the existing portals of asian countries, first an overview of all relevant stories in Asia (<ask sort="time" limit="20">[[concerns::Asia]] [[relevance:=>3]]</ask>) and in Asian countries (<ask sort="time" limit="30">[[concerns::<q>[[Category:Country]] [[located in::Asia]]</q>]] [[relevance:=>4]]</ask>). And so on...

These listings can be widely configured, and it is expected that after a short period of usage it will become clear, how they need to be adapted.

[edit] Personal newspages

Users can create easily a website that compiles news on Wikinews that matches exactly their interests, a service long offered by commercial news sites like CNN, Google News, the New York Times, etc. Because they can add for themselves queries that specify their interests. The syntax is supposedly easy enough to be copy and pasted and further modified due to the readers needs.

Thus a user can create queries like give me all news about Christina Aguilera (<ask sort="time" limit="50">[[concerns::Christina Aguilera]]</ask>), I am interested in African sports (<ask sort="time" limit="10">[[has topic::Sports]] [[concerns::<q>[[Category:Country]] [[located in::Africa]]</q>]] [[relevance:=>4]]</ask>), or I want to keep track of the entertainment news in Tadjikistan, so next time I phone home I can chitchat with my family (<ask sort="time" limit="5">[[has topic::Entertainment]] [[concerns::Tadjikistan]] [[relevance:=>3]]</ask>).

People could also easier creates specialzed portals, that need much less maintenance than before, and thus satisfy a growing need to filter through the information overload problem.

[edit] Editorial boards or individual editors

Wikinews could easily allow for the creation of groups or individuals who could endorse certain stories. These groups, maybe called editorial boards, would have a protected or semi-protected page, where they keep a list of all stories that they endorse (either because they believe or checked the source, or any other reason of their choice). These lists would have the form of [[endorses::Name of story]]. Now every portal, especially the Main Page, could filter the news based on these endorsements, thus preventing spam entries to pop up on the Main Page. There could be filters for family friendly content, violence, or news stories that contradict the creationists agenda.

(It is here taken for granted that contributors who can write on protected pages will adhere to these rules).

(Actually, I got an error here. This would be easy to implement, but it is not possible out of the box as of now, due to some restrictions in the ask query syntax. This functionality is not crucial for the project, but seems quite desirable -- we should be thinking on how to extend our syntax accordingly to allow inverse queries. This would settle this problem)

What query gives an error?--Patrick 10:03, 29 September 2006 (CEST)

[edit] Further advantages

[edit] Better flow of stories

Each story can point to previous stories in a series of stories, for example, election results would follow the news coverage about the final day of the elections, etc. This way, the readers can easily surf back to previous developments of an event, and understand its background (besides being linked to WIkipedia anyway, as well).

Whenever a story declares itself a follow up story via the [[follows::Title of follow-upped Story]] relation, these follow up stories can be automatically shown on the followed up story itself, too, just by the virtue of a query on this story, e.g. <ask default="none" format="ul">[[follows::{{PAGENAME}}]]</ask>

Thus it is easily to create storylines to follow into both directions, the past and the future.

[edit] Possibility to relax partially the NPOV doctrine

Virtually all news providers don't just offer neutral news stories, but also commentaries to certain events. Semantic MediaWiki would allow to state that thes commentaries are written by a certain person, or biased with a specific point of view. By explicating that it can automatically be filtered by these relations and attributes.

[edit] Risks

In case the semantic extensions do not get used, they will not interfere with the current usage of Wikinews. Everything that can be used now, will continue to be usable with semantics switched on as well. So besides some superfluos typing of links and attributes -- which could be cleaned easily with a bot, if the need should arise -- the system does neither slow down nor break the existing site.

A bigger problem could be implementation issues, like security and stability of the extension code. Semantic MediaWiki had one official code review by an active MediaWiki developer, and we are currently used in about a dozen websites. No security issues were yet discovered, and most stability issues could be resolved in a relatively short time. The developers of Semantic MediaWiki are quite committed. The project has an active Mailing list, and the development has recently moved to the official MediaWiki code repository. Although this are no guarantees for good code, they are valid indications.

[edit] Further extensions

The following needs to be implemented, and are not available out of the box. The current main developers of Semantic MediaWiki would be happy if someone would implement these.

[edit] Useful and personalized RSS news feeds

RSS-Feeds could be generated that are based on answers to queries. Thus Wikinews would become usable as a news feed provider -- a service which, of now, is not usable.

[edit] Trust and Semantic Wikinews

Besides the editorial board feature as described above, we are expecting that Wikinews will take advantage of the stable version extension currently being developed. As far as we can predict, we don't see problems in the interaction with this extension.

[edit] Auto-Summary and picture

How to take just the first stories picture and summary, or something like that. Not clear how this would work -- maybe a lot of it is already possible.

[edit] Advantages for Semantic MediaWiki

• the Wikimedia foundation and the general users of the Wikimedia wikis get accustomed to the idea of the Semantic MediaWiki
• more bugs discovered
• wider adaptation
• more visibilty, maybe even get some core developer of MediaWiki to co-take-care of SMW, or more good developers
• would become easily the biggest semantic website out there