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Wikipedia Current Events Portal RSS Feed
I have created an RSS feed that serves the current events listed for each day in Wikipedia's Current Events Portal.
Service first started 2024/01/01.
RSS feed url: https://vikramkashyap.com/wikipedia_current_events.rss
Wikipedia current events portal is a good source of important daily world news. It is concise and does not feature any commentary, editorials, or "human-interest stories". The tree-structure that events are filed under and the links to Wikipedia are especially useful for gaining background knowledge and keeping track of events across time.
There doesn't seem to be any RSS feed tied to the Wikipedia Current Events news so I decided to create one. The RSS feed is updated every day at 2300 GMT using a python script triggered by a cron job. It works as follows:
- The mediawiki markup code for each day in the last week is retrieved using the Wikipedia API.
- The mediawiki markup code is converted to html using pandoc.
- The html code for each day is placed in a separate item and a feed document is generated using the rfeed python module.
It appears many RSS feed viewers will not render the nested lists used to categories the news stories. Instead, the lists are all rendered on the same level, making it a bit harder to read. In the future I plan to figure out a good way to convert all the information to a single-level list.