Comment by marc_abonce
1 day ago
Semi-related: Wikipedia's homepage also contains a very minimalist, manually curated news section with only major world events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
Although that's perhaps way too minimalist?
Wikipedia's current events selection has little to do with significance, being overly focused on events that cause multiple deaths and political events, regardless of their global significance.
Not trying to have an edgy take here, it comes from a genuine attempt to use it for this exact purpose, but it didn't work at all. A train crash killing 20, as unfortunate as it is, can't possibly be one of the 5 most significant things that happened over the last week, but Wikipedia current events considers it one.
Wikipedia current events page was actually one of the reasons for creating this project!
I was disagreeing a lot with their selection of news, for example one of their recent entries is:
"Two people are killed and eleven others are injured when a bus flips on its side on a highway near Prenzlau, northeast of Berlin, Germany."
My system gave it a significance score of 1.8, so similar news should never get to the main page: https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/two-dead-and-four-in...
I hadn't seen this comment and just wrote pretty much a mirror one - Wikipedia overly focuses on one-off accidents and events, rather than news with long-term implications.
Does your service do a good job at thinking longer term? Would you have an example of this?