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Keep China news coverage projections locale-aware

docs/solutions/logic-errors/locale-specific-china-news-coverage-projection.md

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Keep China news coverage projections locale-aware

Problem

The global insights payload is ranked and locale-specific. It cannot prove that every China source completed: Xinhua belongs to the English digest, while MIIT and MOFCOM belong to the Chinese digest. A source-status projection built from only the English digest would treat the absent Chinese entries as successful.

Symptoms

  • The China coverage manifest could mark news.china launched without a source-level Chinese digest check.
  • A healthy English digest could mask an unavailable or stale MIIT or MOFCOM feed.

What Didn't Work

  • Inferring source health from globally ranked top stories loses per-feed outcomes after ranking.
  • Reading only news:digest:v1:full:en is insufficient because the feed-digest cache key includes the requested locale.

Solution

Define each audited China source with the locale of the digest that evaluates it:

js
export const CHINA_NEWS_SOURCES = Object.freeze([
  { source: 'Xinhua', digestLanguage: 'en' },
  { source: 'MIIT (China)', digestLanguage: 'zh' },
  { source: 'MOFCOM (China)', digestLanguage: 'zh' },
]);

scripts/seed-insights.mjs reads the normal English digest, reads or warms the supplemental Chinese digest, and passes both to buildChinaNewsCoverage. The helper emits available only for a digest with a valid generatedAt timestamp and no exceptional feed status; absent, timeout, all-undated, and missing-locale cases remain unavailable.

Publish the projection separately at news:insights:v1:CN. Strip it from the canonical news:insights:v1 payload, so the user-facing global digest contract remains unchanged. When a fresh digest run retains a last-known-good global brief, carry the fresh projection through that return solely for afterPublish; the transform still removes it before the public payload is written. The China manifest requires all three named sources to be available and timestamped before news.china is healthy.

Why This Works

list-feed-digest stores results under news:digest:v1:${variant}:${lang}, so its per-feed status is authoritative only for the requested locale. Evaluating each source against its own locale prevents missing Chinese feeds from being interpreted as normal absent-status entries.

The Chinese check is supplemental: its failure is caught and produces an unavailable projection rather than preventing the existing global insights seed from publishing. A brief-only degradation can retain the last-known-good global payload while still publishing fresh source evidence. If the English digest itself is unavailable, there is no new projection, so the old projection is only TTL-extended and the audit eventually reports it stale instead of green.

Prevention

  • For a country-specific audit built from locale-filtered inputs, record the locale beside every source and test a missing supplemental digest explicitly.
  • Keep audit-only projections separate from ranked or public payloads, then make the audit require the projection's per-source timestamps and statuses.
  • Test the last-known-good branch separately: preserve fresh audit-only evidence when the public payload falls back for an unrelated brief-generation failure.