Both Revisionista and Watch Your Mouth have not been updating correctly for about a week due. Working again now. Sorry for the outage.

I’ve just added the BBC health feed to Revisionista so we’ll start monitoring more health related articles. So far, the only health articles included were from the World or UK feeds.

Revisionista now explicitly excludes BBC sport articles from it’s monitoring and I’ve deleted any from the last couple of months. This is because these articles generate a vast number of revisions mostly due to score updates during games. This is wasting News Sniffer resources that could be better spent monitoring other articles.

News Sniffer was down for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon whilst I upgraded the software that runs it. This fixes a few display bugs and more importantly patches up another problem where bbc comments were being misclassed as censored. The misclassification was due to a mistake when handling british summer time, so it’s only been prevalent since the end of March. We double checked all censored comment from the last few months and removed any misclassified ones.

Due to the downtime whilst we cleaned and reindexed the database, some news articles and bbc comments were not added to the database so will not be tracked. So, if you’re looking for a particular news article published yesterday afternoon, it’s likely that it is missing. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The biggest new feature is vastly improved search system.

It works like most search engines, so just type keywords in and you get results. You can be a bit more advanced too though. Say you want to find all censored bbc comments by the author ‘John Smith’. Do a search for:

author:"john smith"

Read the rest of this entry »

Apologies but due to a VPN problem, News Sniffer has not been monitoring news articles or Have Your Say forums for the last 2 days. All working again now though. I’ll set up some alerting system to prevent this happening again.

I’ve just added the BBC UK Politics section to Revisionista, so articles from it will be monitored for changes from now on.

The NHS Blog Doctor blog used Revisionista to expose a bit of a “cover-up” on a BBC News article.

Basically, NHS Blog Doctor criticised a story on babies with milk allergies published by the BBC. They even made a formal written complaint. The article was then changed and readers started accusing NHS Blog Doctor of misrepresenting the BBC. They never received a reply from the BBC about their complaint. Not even an acknowledgement.

They used News Sniffer to show the article had been changed. Go read the whole thing.

The Revisionista diff of the particular change is here.

I’ve tweaked the way BBC news articles are parsed for Revisionista. Unfortunately this means you’ll see a flurry of new revisions, with no actual changes (though the whole article will be marked as changed).

I also fixed the Guardian news article title parsing - they changed things around a bit. This shouldn’t result in any flurries.

The BBC Editors blog has mentioned News Sniffer today.

It’s largely just marginalised us, but it’s rather ambiguous. When they suggest that Revisionista will not find examples of bias, I can’t decide if they mean that the BBC is not biased, or that they are just very good at it.

Some of the recommended revisions are interesting, but maybe we need a comments feature so people can explain and discuss their recommendations.

And they also describe their censoring of ‘Have Your Say’ comments as “censoring” in quotation marks. I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean either. Is it not censorship when they remove comments? Or do they not remove comments?

See the top recommended censored comments for some interesting examples of “censorship”.

I rolled out the new version of News Sniffer last night. It’s mostly changes to Revisionista:

• The Guardian and Independent World and UK feeds added to Revisionista
• Voting system for Revisionista versions. Recommend interesting revisions for others
• Recommended revisions list and RSS feed
• The Revisionista revision list displays the latest title
• Tweaked the Revisionista layout to be a bit cleaner
• Added some more stats to the front page summary
• The Revisionista search now includes titles
• A few performance tweaks

The search system is a little crummy at the moment. I have plans to add a more advanced searching system in future.

Anyway, get recommending revisions!