I guess one implementation could be a single (very long) dropdown, with all of the continents and subregions. Another might be might be five separate continent-based dropdown menus, and being able to select subregions for each,

This sounds very useful but I'm not sure a fixed list would be the best approach. For example, that split of European regions isn't particularly interesting to me — I'd much rather have news related to the EU, for instance, or the Iberian peninsula, or Portugal specifically, or even a particular region or city within.

Perhaps a dynamic search box with autocomplete, allowing any geographic entity (maybe based on it inspired by Nominatim, the named entity search engine associated with OpenStreetMap) would be more flexible.

It's also unclear to me how these geographic scopes would be connected to individual articles. Is the current behaviour based on things like categories, or is it actually using geographic coordinates?

In T434608#12222342, @waldyrious wrote:

This sounds very useful but I'm not sure a fixed list would be the best approach. For example, that split of European regions isn't particularly interesting to me — I'd much rather have news related to the EU, for instance, or the Iberian peninsula, or Portugal specifically, or even a particular region or city within.

Perhaps a dynamic search box with autocomplete, allowing any geographic entity (maybe based on it inspired by Nominatim, the named entity search engine associated with OpenStreetMap) would be more flexible.

It's also unclear to me how these geographic scopes would be connected to individual articles. Is the current behaviour based on things like categories, or is it actually using geographic coordinates?

Yes, I think to keep things simpler, we could just focus on converting "Americas" into a dropdown, with other options being Africa, Asia, Europe and Oceania, and forget about subregions for the moment.

The current behavior is indeed strictly category-based.

I've suggested a more vertsatile future system at T434980

In T434608#12223355, @Pharos wrote:

I've suggested a more vertsatile future system at T434980

Given that T434980 is now implemented with user-generated portals, I suggest this feature be reimagined as a dropdown selection type that could also be optionally used for the flexible Wikinewsie portal system. For example, for the 50 states of the US, which would definitely be too many to show them all in the header.