The News Online WikiProxy

I, along with several million other folk, visit BBC News Online and Wikipedia pretty much every day, so I expect Stef Magdalinski ‘s unnoficial merger of the two - The News Online WikiProxy - will come in handy.

In a post titled Don’t get me wrong, I really like BBC News Online, Stef explains the thinking behind the site, and its features:

My first project for 8 years aims to demonstrate a tiny fraction of what a more open News Online could be.

It’s a proxy for the site, that does the following things:

• retrieves a page from News Online, and regexes out “Capitalised Phrases” and acronyms. It then tests these against a database of wikipedia topic titles. If the phrase is a topic in wikipedia, then it’s turned into a hyperlink
• uses the technorati API to add a sidebar of links to blogs referencing the story. Now you can see who’s talking about the story from the story itself
• as a bonus, my code breaks that bloody awful ticker. I’m not fixing it.
• because that’s how links should be, my links are underlined.
• reduces page bloat by about 10% by stripping acres of whitespace.

No doubt, I’m breaking all kinds of copyright and being incredibly naughty doing this, but it’s just a toy, and if they really want to sue a licence fee payer, well, I guess I’ll just have to take it down.

Let’s hope the Beeb take the hint, even if they do send in the legal attack dogs - News Online is an essential site, but it should go beyond tossing in a few external links in connecting to the wider web.

(Via Ben Hammersley.)

Posted at 9pm on 04/10/04 by Jack Mottram to the news, web category.
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Tags: news, web