About Lanka Monitor

Lanka Monitor is an automated news monitor for Sri Lanka. It gathers reporting about the country from news outlets around the world, in every language it can read, translates headlines and summaries into English, and sorts them into topic sections. It refreshes every 15 minutes.

How it works

Stories are discovered through the GDELT global news index and through direct feeds from Sri Lankan outlets in Sinhala, Tamil and English. Each item is machine-translated where needed and placed in a section by keyword rules. Every item links to the original publisher: Lanka Monitor points readers to sources and does not republish articles.

Sensitive stories are reviewed by an editor

Before anything appears on the site, an editor must approve stories that allege sexual violence, name a person accused of a crime, or involve religion together with conflict, crime or politics. Everything else publishes automatically.

Limits you should know about

Machine translation makes mistakes, and keyword sorting sometimes files a story in the wrong section. Headlines report what their sources say; appearing here is not confirmation that a claim is true. If something looks wrong, follow the link to the original source and use the contact box to tell us.

Economic figures

Debt indicators come from World Bank Open Data. IMF programme details and creditor breakdowns are entered from official Central Bank of Sri Lanka and IMF publications, and each figure is dated and sourced where it appears.