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WikiProxy - BBC News meets Wikipedia

Hey,

Don't get me wrong, I really like BBC News Online (hurrah!) but I don't like its conservative link policy. I also want to find out what people in the Blogsphere think about the news.

So I've built "WikiProxy", a proxy for the bbc.co.uk/news 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.

Disclaimer: This prototype was actually built in association with the BBC earlier in the year

  • 11 May 2005 12:11 PM

Comments  Post a comment

  • 1.
  • On 11 May 2005 05:03 PM,
  • Sj said:

Stef's WikiProxy has been rocking my world for some time now. You should all check it out. The page bloat reduction is just icing on the cake.

  • 2.
  • On 11 May 2005 05:52 PM,
  • Johan said:

Very nice indeed. Unfortunately I use the BBC's RSS feed to read the news, and that won't take me to your proxy.

Or will it?

  • 3.
  • On 11 May 2005 06:00 PM,
  • Eric said:

I can't see the Technorati sidebar of blog entries. Where are these?

  • 4.
  • On 11 May 2005 07:49 PM,
  • Andre said:

I like the idea. Any chance you could apply your changes to the RSS feeds as well?

  • 5.
  • On 11 May 2005 07:50 PM,
  • James said:

That's really cool - I'm going to bookmark that immediately. I love the links to other blogs and wiki links, it really works well. Nice!

  • 6.
  • On 11 May 2005 08:50 PM,
  • bodnotbod said:

I'm a Wikipedian (lying dormant for the moment) and I think this is a great idea.

Particularly like the way it links to people's names.

I was a bit disappointed initially on seeing an article about 'black holes' with many phrases ripe for Wikipedia integration unlinked, but I see that this would be difficult to set rules for as WP might end up providing links to pretty much every word in any report.

I don't seem to be getting a sidebar? The Wiki links are a little intrusive too (though not in a nasty sort of way). Perhaps a consolidated list of them somewhere, rather than all over the body of the article?

  • 8.
  • On 12 May 2005 08:40 AM,
  • Mr Green said:

On my PC and in my browser I have my font size set slightly bigger than normal.

The links haven't been scaled like all the other fonts so are all really tiny compared to the surrounding text which makes the articles hard to read.

Otherwise a nice feature.

  • 9.
  • On 12 May 2005 09:09 AM,
  • Jon said:

Hey! This is great. This is somthing the BBC should take note of. There's all this great technology for linking resources that bloggers (and others) have been using for ages and could make the BBC site a realy usefull portal.

  • 10.
  • On 12 May 2005 11:16 AM,
  • Nate said:

From the point of view of a user who browses the BBC News website for countless hours in a day, bringing together all these great web information sources is brilliant and very worthwhile.

I hope you don't mind me setting my homepage from the original BBC News site to your wikiproxy ;)

  • 11.
  • On 12 May 2005 03:49 PM,
  • marc said:

This looks like a cool project!
One bug tho: I can't seem to be able to switch to the international version without getting linked back to the main bbc news site

  • 12.
  • On 12 May 2005 04:19 PM,
  • Steve said:

It works quite well, one thing I found a bit annoying was thatby default the links opened in the same tab in Firefox thus navigating me away from the page I was reading. If you used a named target then you could ensure that clicked links opened up in a separate window/tab so that each link used the same new window.

  • 13.
  • On 12 May 2005 04:58 PM,
  • Julian said:

This is good, worked fine on most pages, but seemed to have trouble displaying some graphics on the original BBC pages

  • 14.
  • On 13 May 2005 11:08 AM,
  • dann said:

regarding last comment by Julian:
http://wikiproxy.whitelabel.org/index.php?url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4543611.stm

---scrool to the half of the page
---looks nasty on both IE 6 and Mozilla 1.0.3

---apart from that, love the idea!

This is an excellent tool :) If the BBC takes note, maybe they can look at changing H2G2 to a Wiki, and linking it internally as it's own Wiki!

  • 16.
  • On 13 May 2005 10:24 PM,
  • qua said:

wow!
i just read about backstage 15 minutes ago - had this idea - found it already realized :)
really, really great job.

thanks to you, i have a new startpage now

This is absolutely fantastic!

The absolute clincher would be if you or someone could apply this to the RSS feed - so that in Firefox etc. you can subscribe to an RSS feed that links to your site rather than directly to the BBC.

Brilliant... by the way, display probs on this page:

http://wikiproxy.whitelabel.org/index.php?url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4539675.stm

A fantastically brilliant innovation!

Well done Stef!

  • 20.
  • On 19 May 2005 05:10 PM,
  • Johan said:

If this was turned into a greasemonkey script, you could get exactly the same affect from the 'real' BBC site.

The advantage with this is that those of us arriving at the BBC via RSS would still get the blogs etc.

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/
http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/

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