Wikinews talk:Public domain news sources

Content transferred from the water cooler.

Voice of America

According to the VOAnews.com disclaimer, "All text, audio and video material produced exclusively by the Voice of America is public domain." This does mean we get to copy them? --Jiang 09:36, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Yes. User:Eloquence and User:AaronSw spotted this last month. Perhaps there should be a page on public domain sources. --merriam 10:33, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Why you would ever want to source pure propaganda is beyond me but, OKAY! SURE! RIGHT ON!

Wait, VOA is pure propaganda? I don't know about that. Flying Hamster 19:04, 6 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Does it not fall under the pentagon's budget? And even if it didn't, it's still a government project. - Che y Marijuana (not registered just yet)

So should we use their articles as stubs? Here's a test article Taiwan Voters Move Away From Chen's Agenda Mydotnet 23:21, 11 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Earthquakes

The USGS earthquake data is public domain. Could we somehow display that data on Wikinews? I'm more concerned about properly (and interestingly) displaying rather than getting the data (which is publicly available and easily retrievable) -- IlyaHaykinson 05:44, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

I went ahead and uploaded and posted more images from the USGS in the article. Is there more data you are interested in from that site? — DV 07:25, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

The site actually provides automatic machine-readable feeds of recent earthquakes from around the world. The site also regularly generates maps of those earthquakes. It might be nice to incorporate those data feeds into Wikinews (a la weather, perhaps with some back-end bot support). -- IlyaHaykinson 07:32, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)

One interesting problem that needs to be solved for fully-automated reports is how to post an image to the Commons under programmatic or scripted control, using an application that is continuously running on someone's machine (at least until a Wiki developer is convinced to place it as a background process on the server). Such an image would be generated and posted whenever a continuously polled site returns some data that has either changed (in the case of the weather) or exceeded some threshold (in the case of earthquakes).

To help automate the weather updates, User Monet (from "de" Wikinews) suggested using a static name for the current weather report image. I'm going to change over to posting one pair of images with the subnames "current" and "previous", and another pair using the current naming scheme (for archival purposes). This will allow us to avoid having to update the links template every day.

But we'll still need the programmatic or scripted posting to fully automate this task. Especially for earthquakes, this is important in case an earthquake happens while we're all away from the site.

Please let me know if you have ideas of how we can automate posting a generated image (for both weather and earthquakes). I'm thinking part of this automation will involve monitoring a "watch directory" to check the modification date and time of certain local images on the machine of the person running the earthquake and weather processes.

— DV 16:24, 28 Dec 2004 (UTC)