Icons:
When topics have articles from multiple sources on the same subject, the topic should have this icon:


All topics by users (yes, this is not just for RSS imports, feel free to alert us to any news The Net didn't catch), or that have been flagged as more interesting should have this icon:


Deletions:

• Links to articles that are exact duplicates of a previously posted article will be deleted. The first news publication to publish that article gets the right to stay. The only exception to this will be when a far less-read website publishes something and a hugely popular other website mirrors for it. An example would be something on a niche technical website getting mirrored onto CNN.
• "Articles" that are nothing more than a copy/paste of an article from a Wikimedia project.
• Forum topics (with RSS feeds) that are not about any Wikimedia project but only mention it.

Moves:
Articles that are not about a Wikimedia project (such as Wikipedia) will be mass-moved to the "Less Relevant" subforum. Even if it uses Wikipedia only as a source or something to refer to for information it still gives an idea of how much the Media is using Wikipedia/aware of it/uses it. When a major publication (such as the BBC or CNN) links or uses Wikipedia as a source it should probably be flagged with , but still moved to Less Relevant unless it's actually about Wikimedia/Wikipedia.

I know that WR's news grabber is just a robot, but is there some meaningful way that regurgitated "news" reports like this could be expunged from WR? Maybe it doesn't bother anybody else, but to me, I'd rather just see the original Wired article (and have that one place to comment on it), rather than all of these mirrors spitting out the same article.

Thoughts?

Greg

I go through and consolidate similar articles into the same thread every 3-4 days or so. It seems to work out OK - having them lined up the way they're doing now, in this case, gives us some vague idea of how much "legs" each story has, though it's obviously not the least bit scientific...

It used to be they (i.e., my predecessors in this endeavor) deleted all but the first incoming story thread, but that caused three problems. First, there was no indicator whatsoever of the story's legs when they did that. Second, it tended to fill up the "Trash Bin" so that we couldn't find posts that had been deleted controversially amidst all the RSS stuff, and third (and most importantly), so many online news sites delete stories after a few weeks or months, keeping each post turned out to be a "massive redundancy" approach to being able to find the original stories after time had passed, without having to go back and re-check links for 404 errors manually.

Anyway, there's no way to do it automatically, and though I certainly don't mind doing it, we could give someone moderator rights to this particular forum to help out. I wouldn't want to do that unilaterally, but it's not like it's a glamor-job in any case!

I didn't think about that. Good point and good reason. I retract my statement.

(As one who got a personal thrill out of seeing AP writer Brian Bergstein's story about me repeated in no less than 185 different news properties, I'm surprised that I even suggested that we remove duplicates from a message board!)

Greg