Wikimedia Enterprise/Breaking news



[LINK TO DEMO] Note that this is a desktop only app.

What is “Breaking News”?
The Breaking News Feature identifies large-scale global news events as they are being written about across Wikipedia. These events are then marked with a boolean field, allowing users to easily filter and leverage relevant content from Wikimedia sources. The feature is currently in its beta phase, continuously evolving to deliver even more accurate and comprehensive results over time.

We want to be able to capture every new and existing news event being worked on across Wikipedia, no matter how big or small, or how niche a certain group of people, or what country or continent it takes place. It’s a huge challenge – especially crafting a feature that works across Wikipedia language projects.

Wikimedia Enterprise relies on community approaches to editing in crafting features. Please reach out to us with your recommendations on templates to lean on smaller language projects, or with knowledge of any editing behaviors. Using the demo, is in itself feedback. Please read the next section on how to!

My hope is that with your feedback, we can improve this feature by cutting out false positives and tinkering with the underlying algorithm to generate better, faster and more accurate results.

As the website formally known as Twitter continues to be less reflective of reality, Wikipedia can fill that gap. We hope a tool will grow from this that both the Community of Editors and our third-party reusers can rely on to know where to best place their attention —  both for editors and readers.

The work is heavily based on this research I conducted for our product strategy last year.

You can access this feature via WME API via WM Cloud Services.

How to use this demo
In the ‘Reaction’ column, you’ll see a red thumbs down and a green thumbs up. If the article in the row relates to a news event please click the green thumb, in the opposite case, click the red thumb.

After you vote, you can add a comment as to your reasoning if you'd like.

You can only vote once per row. If you made a mistake, don’t worry.

Use the toggles at the top to switch between results on different language projects, amount of editors and amount of edits at the point that our algorithm surfaces the content.

The results displayed update every day and number of editors or edits, every half-hour. We will work to cut the update time for the latter two to around five minutes.

You may notice that this demo does not include pageviews, that’s because they’re still delayed by 24 hours so not very useful at diagnosing live events. We’re working on what page views can mean for this feature.

Note that this is a desktop only app.

How to send us feedback
There are many ways to get in touch with us. Any feedback is good feedback.


 * Post questions or answers via our metaWiki talk page.
 * Get in touch with me directly with ideas and thoughts at [mailto:fnavas@wikimedia.org fnavas@wikimedia.org]. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
 * Finally, as with all of Enterprise’s work, should you find a bug or see a clear opportunity please file a ticket via our Phab board. We will do our best to respond in a timely manner.

Technical details
STILL TO COME