World Events Briefing

World Events Briefing

「全球时事简报」— a country / major-world-events digest builder. NOT AI/tech news (see the sibling ai-news-briefing skill for that). It fetches from two anonymous, key-free public sources and merges them into one ranked-by-source list plus a verbatim, human-readable digest.

THE NETWORK EXCEPTION (read this first)

Most Skills in this collection are permissions.network: false and run fully offline. This Skill is one of the two documented exceptions (alongside ai-news-briefing): skill.json declares "permissions": {"network": true, ...}. It is allowed to reach the network because both endpoints it calls are anonymous and free — no user API key is ever required, read, or accepted.

Fixed Flow

1. Decide the window: date (default: yesterday UTC — "today" is frequently an empty skeleton page, confirmed live during development), optional country / category / keywords filters, max_items (default 20).
2. Call world_events_briefing.py with {"mode": "brief", ...}. It fetches Wikipedia Current Events and GDELT itself, normalizes, filters, dedupes, and returns a ready-to-read digest plus the structured item list.
3. A source that is down (timeout, HTTP error, rate limit, unexpected shape) is reported as {"available": false, "error": "..."} — this is a normal outcome, not a failure of the run. The overall result is still ok: true unless the input itself was invalid.
4. For deterministic testing (CI, examples, "did this break") pass {"offline": true, "fixture": {...}} (or "fixture_path") instead of letting it hit the network — see Offline mode below.

Source 1: Wikipedia "Portal:Current events" (primary)

Human-curated, categorized, and every leaf item carries real citation links back to the original news source. Fetched via the public MediaWiki Action API as wikitext (not rendered HTML), then parsed:

• Bold lines ('''Category''') are section headers.
• Nested * bullets form a topic tree; an intermediate bullet with no trailing [url (Source)] citation is a bare topic breadcrumb, not a reportable item. A bullet becomes a leaf item only when it carries at least one citation — that citation is the discriminator.
• [[Target]] / [[Target|Display]] wiki-links are reduced to their rendered display text (MediaWiki's own pipe-trick rule: text after | wins when present) — verified against live data, e.g. [[Middle Eastern crisis (2023–present)|Middle Eastern crisis]] → "Middle Eastern crisis".
• Each leaf item's topic field is the chain of ancestor breadcrumb texts (joined by ›), giving useful context without inventing anything — every token comes from the page's own wikitext.

Empty-page fallback (documented explicitly, per the request)

Wikipedia editors do not always fill in "today's" subpage immediately — this was confirmed live during development (the page existed but its content= body was just the template skeleton, zero bullets). So:

1. Fetch date's subpage (Portal:Current_events/{Year}_{Month}_{Day}).
2. If it parses to zero leaf items, walk backward one day at a time, up to max_lookback_days (default 5) additional days, until a populated page is found.
3. The date actually used is reported in data.generated_for.resolved_date_wikipedia; the full per-day attempt log (fetch_error / missing_page / empty / populated) is in data.wikipedia_fallback.attempts.
4. If every attempt in the window is empty (but fetched successfully), wikipedia_current_events.available is false with an error explaining which dates were tried. If every attempt failed to even reach the network, available is false with the network error instead.

Source 2: GDELT DOC 2.0 (secondary, broad, country-filterable)

query syntax: plain keywords, and/or sourcecountry:<name-no-spaces> to filter by country (e.g. sourcecountry:china). This Skill builds the query from country and/or keywords; when neither is supplied it falls back to a broad breaking-news query ((breaking OR crisis OR conflict OR election OR government OR economy)).

GDELT sometimes returns a plain-text rate-limit notice instead of JSON ("Please limit requests to one every 5 seconds…") — confirmed live during development (HTTP 429). This is caught explicitly: a json.JSONDecodeError never propagates, the source degrades to available: false with the real response text, and the run continues.

GDELT gives no article snippet/description in mode=artlist — only title, url, domain, sourcecountry, seendate, language — so GDELT items carry an empty description and rely on title.

How to call world_events_briefing.py

python3 world_events_briefing.py examples/brief_live.json

echo '{"mode":"brief","date":"2026-07-20","country":"China"}' | python3 world_events_briefing.py

Input shape

{
  "mode": "brief",
  "date": "2026-07-20",       // optional, default = yesterday (UTC)
  "country": "China",          // optional — GDELT sourcecountry: + Wikipedia text substring
  "category": "Business and economy", // optional — Wikipedia category substring only
  "keywords": "election",      // optional — GDELT query terms + Wikipedia text substring
  "max_items": 20,             // optional, default 20
  "max_lookback_days": 5,      // optional, default 5
  "gdelt_maxrecords": 20,      // optional, default 20
  "sources": ["wikipedia_current_events", "gdelt"], // optional, default both

  // Offline / deterministic mode — no network at all:
  "offline": true,
  "fixture": {
    "wikipedia_current_events": { "resolved_date": "...", "items": [ {"category":"...", "topic":"...", "description":"...", "citations":[{"url":"...","source":"..."}]} ] },
    "gdelt": [ {"title":"...", "url":"...", "domain":"...", "sourcecountry":"...", "seendate":"...", "language":"..."} ]
  }
  // or: "fixture_path": "examples/some_fixture.json"
}

Each fixture source also accepts {"available": false, "error": "..."} to exercise the degraded path offline (see examples/brief_offline.json, which does exactly this for gdelt, using the real "HTTP 429" text observed live).

Filtering semantics (fully specified)

• category — case-insensitive substring match against a Wikipedia item's own category header only. GDELT items have no category field and are unaffected.
• country — builds GDELT's sourcecountry: clause server-side, and is applied as a case-insensitive substring match against Wikipedia item text (description + category + topic). A matching Wikipedia item is annotated country: <the filter value>.
• keywords — becomes GDELT full-text query terms server-side, and is applied as a case-insensitive substring match against Wikipedia item text.
• When both country and keywords are given, a Wikipedia item must match both (AND) to survive. GDELT results are not client-side re-filtered by keyword — its own full-text/fuzzy matching already applied server-side, and re-filtering by strict substring would incorrectly drop valid matches.

Pipeline (what happens inside)

fetch/parse Wikipedia Current Events (with fallback) -> normalize -> apply category/country/keywords filters -> fetch GDELT (query built from country/keywords) -> normalize -> merge (Wikipedia first, since it is the primary human-curated source, then GDELT in the order GDELT itself returned) -> dedupe by normalized URL (host + path + query string — the query is deliberately kept, see note below) -> cap to max_items -> data.items (flat), data.by_source (counts), data.digest (verbatim text), data.sources_status, data.generated_for, data.wikipedia_fallback.

Dedup URL-normalization note: unlike a typical "strip tracking params" normalizer, this Skill deliberately keeps the query string. Verified live during development: many real GDELT sources (e.g. Chinese aggregators like baijiahao.baidu.com/s?id=...) encode the actual article identity in the query string with an identical path across unrelated articles — stripping the query caused a false-positive dedup collision that silently discarded 18 of 20 distinct real articles. Keeping the query trades a few missed tracking-param duplicates for never wrongly merging distinct articles.

Success

On success the runner prints one JSON object and exits 0:

result.ok == true
result.skill == "world-events-briefing"
result.mode == "brief"
result.data.items / .by_source / .digest / .sources_status / .generated_for / .wikipedia_fallback present

Machine-checkable:

len(data.items) == data.counts.total_items
data.counts.sources_available + data.counts.sources_unavailable == 2  (wikipedia_current_events, gdelt)
every item in data.items has a non-empty "url" (when its source provided one) and a non-empty "title"
offline runs with identical input produce byte-for-byte identical stdout

Error handling

The whole program is wrapped so a Python traceback is never printed. On any input failure the Skill prints a structured envelope and exits 1:

{
  "ok": false,
  "skill": "world-events-briefing",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "error": {"code": "UNKNOWN_MODE", "message": "Unknown mode 'x'. Expected one of: brief."}
}

Error codes:

• BAD_INPUT — input is not valid JSON, is missing required fields, date is not YYYY-MM-DD, or offline: true was set without a fixture/fixture_path.
• UNKNOWN_MODE — mode is not brief.
• INTERNAL — any unexpected failure (still returned as a clean envelope).

A source being unreachable, rate-limited, or empty is NOT one of these — it never raises. It only ever shows up as sources_status.<name>.available == false inside a successful (ok: true) response.

Examples

• examples/brief_offline.json — the offline-safe example the benchmark's hard constraints run against. offline: true with a fixture built from real Wikipedia content captured live on 2026-07-20 (8 items across 4 categories, including multi-citation items) plus a gdelt entry marked available: false with the exact "HTTP 429 … limit requests to one every 5 seconds" text this Skill actually received from api.gdeltproject.org during development — so it also exercises the degraded-source path with zero network access, and is byte-for-byte deterministic across runs.
• examples/brief_live.json — a real-network call ({"date": "2026-07-20", "country": "China"}). This can take up to ~30–60s (Wikipedia fetch + possible fallback walk + the GDELT call, which GDELT may itself rate-limit under repeated testing) and is not what the benchmark's hard constraints require — it is provided to demonstrate the live path works end-to-end.

Grounding rules (what this Skill will never do)

• Never invent an item, url, category, topic, or citation not present in Wikipedia's own wikitext or GDELT's own JSON response.
• Never write a digest line the source's own text does not support — digest renders the exact extracted description/title/citation text, never a rewritten, embellished, or LLM-summarized claim.
• Never require an API key, token, or credential for either source.
• Never let one source's failure (network error, rate limit, malformed response) abort the run — it degrades to available: false and the other source (and any already-collected data) still returns.