Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Mirroring

How can we generate a good RSS feed for Signpost articles, and perhaps simultaneously create a better/alternative reading experience? This list compiled by Pete Forsyth (talk) in late December 2016, with substantial help from Arborrhythms.

Potential problems to address:

1. Get listed on Google News
2. Better SEO performance (considerations might include "ref=canonical", URL naming, title tags in headers...)
3. Human-readable version of Signpost without unnecessary Wikipedia menus and links (top and left)
4. Create a version of the Signpost that's nice to read on mobile devices (mobile web, Wikipedia app, possibly even Signpost app...)
5. Consideration: Grabbing the comments (transcluded from the talk page) is important. Updating frequently (if mirrored) to include recent comments.

Two possible kinds of solutions

1. No mirroring, but RSS feed that links to existing content.
2. Our own web site, mirroring content, with its own RSS

Technical approaches

1. Special:export
   • Produces xml which needs to be rendered. Even templates are not rendered!
2. ePub export
   • PediaPress not actively maintained
   • Currently, Wikipedia exports PDF but not ePub. (ePub is the one that would be useful.)
   • https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:EPubExport (ancient)
   • relevant discussion: https://wiki.riteme.site/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Offline_Content_Generator
3. mirroring -- using something like wget / httrack, and then tidying up with a script (ideally no human editing needed)
   • Not as perfect as it should be (image width, bullets on galleries...) Pulls across dependencies that may need tweaking. Links need to be updated to reflect signpost.wiki.
4. FeaturedFeeds:
   • RSS to point to existing Wikipedia pages. Easy to set up (file a bug). Does not address any formatting issues. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FeaturedFeeds
5. Integration with WordPress:
   • Plugins that will migrate / embed.
   • Some were commercial. None seemed suitable.
   • https://wordpress.org/plugins/rdp-wiki-embed/
6. Printable:
   • External links become URLs
   • Otherwise, pretty good.
   • &printable=yes