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Comment by dv35z | Hacker News Reader

One way to be aware of current events is to create a recurring calendar invite for yourself (e.g. Sunday mornings) with a link to the Wikipedia current events page (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events). Tab-open 20+ Wiki pages of interest, and immerse for an timebox (1-2hr). The outcome is having a greater mental map of the news, without all the deliberate emotional provocation of mass media headlines. “Aged news”

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I've found myself browsing the current events page every morning and I think I would prefer your method much more. As emerging stories are verified and context is added, I've found I'm revisiting the same pages over and over.

I'm going to set up a calendar event right now. Thanks!

When there is breaking news, and there are not sufficient details yet, one option is to get the Wiki URL of the news event, and add that URL to your calendar’s recurring “Read the news” event’s description field. As a result, in several weeks you will have a backlog of news articles to read, and you will be confident that you’re tracking the article and that it will have more value over time. As you mentioned, if there are evergreen topics you want to keep track of, you could include those links in the calendar invite - easy to tab-open & catch up.

I read Wikipedia's current events via RSS:

=> https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/current_events/

It has a much higher signal-to-noise ratio for “serious” news than most “serious” news outlets seem to.

I am a big fan of weekly digests. Early news reports so often get it wrong, and good summaries can't thrive on hype.

I also does this. The main problem IMO is info duplication: sames infos are duplicated on different websites/sources & sometimes inside sources (eg Twitter) and some is missing on individual one. I’m thinking of an aggregator that would group info (preferably free of rights) per individual news and summarise it.

low effort post: I've been thinking about a (real time) 3D point-cloud (news articles) NLP-summation visualization of the news, seeing it skew towards certain directions like war or something as the "absolute worst case".

My data source would be for example Reddit's API for worldnews/news top rated.

That would be very interesting.

Some other data researcher has dipped into this a bit:

SpiegelMining – Reverse Engineering von Spiegel-Online (33c3): * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YpwsdRKt8Q * English version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYviBstTUwo

Working my way through this, wish they lowered speaker's voice on the English version so it's easier to focus on the English one for me/don't know German.

But it's better than nothing, certainly better than the auto-translated captions ha.

Yeah this thing here https://youtu.be/bYviBstTUwo?t=1411 I gotta get to a point where I can make that, the weights/math part.

This sounds interesting. Seeing a map, the dots of interest - you could even have “related wikipedia pages which reference this data point, and which have a sudden influx of view/edit activity”.

As a result, a user could explore a map, and could see the most relevant wiki pages (or even extracted insights) on the sidebar. Date range slider could explore the past (eg previous wars in Afghanistan, and which articles are most relevant), and zoom to the future (many Wiki pages reference dates & plans - it would be interesting to zoom to 10 years from now, and see planned initiatives, construction projects, trade agreements, and so on)

A true spatial news explorer.

You might be interested in http://news-explorer.mybluemix.net/?query=Current%20Events&t...

Oh that's cool. Thanks for that link

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