See discussion on Bug 20818. (I'm not sure if this should be filed under a different product then 'Wikimedia', it didn't really seem to fit anywhere). per Tim's suggestion I'm refiling this in a separate bug from Bug 20818
Basically, currently a variety of hacks are used to get Wikinews on Google news. Google news spiders our main page, and uses a variety of techniques to try to determine which links are links to news articles, and which are not. These techniques have a tendency not to always work. (For example the following articles were not listed despite the hack: http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Payment_pending;_Canadian_recording_industry_set_for_six_billion_penalties%3F , http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Boeing_787_%22Dreamliner%22_makes_maiden_flight , http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Israel_%22illegally_annexing%22_east_Jerusalem,_EU_reports and we have really no idea why)
Google news also allows for news websites to submit there articles via a "Google News Sitemap" which is a custom xml format that describes pages on a website, with a minimal amount of meta data. When submitting news via a sitemap, Google relaxes their standards for detecting what a news url is, and anything that they do not index, they give a reason for why it was not indexed ( http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93994 ) This would hopefully reduce the above mentioned issues of articles not appearing on google news, and in any case where an article still did not appear, we would at least know why.
To that end, as many of you know, Amgine has developed an extension called GNSM (for Google news site map), which more or less takes the intersection extension, and allows the results to be output as a sitemap that is accessed via a special page. (extension is currently at: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/GNSM/ demo page at http://wiki.enwn.net/index.php/Special:SpecialGNSM ).
This has the additional benefit of potentially (should it be enabled) of also giving Wikinews on-site RSS feeds. Currently we rely on off wiki methods of generating our rss feeds. (Someone [CSpurrier?] runs a script which feeds an rss feed which is forwarded to feedburner for the main feed, some of the secondary feeds are from the toolserver, which has a tendency to break). It would be nice to have feeds generated on-wiki, if simply because it would look more professional to have the rss feed on the same domain as the site.
To conclude, as has been said before, well we understand that in some people's opinion GNSM may not be fully ready to be deployed as of yet, we would really really appreciate it if it was developed to the point where it is ready, and as soon as possible reviewed/deployed on wikinews.
Thank you.
-bawolff
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement