Hacktoberfest 2026: the issues maintainers tagged for October, open and beginner-friendly. Browse Hacktoberfest issues

Tool suggestion: Lanes (compares each side's press coverage of the same conflict events)

Open Beginner friendly
#905 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
67/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Read https://lanes.news first, then review its About and corroboration method pages to understand the suggested tool. The issue names no repository file or test; done means determining whether Lanes fits the toolkit's criteria and identifying the appropriate catalog documentation change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Suggested category: Conflict

Disclosure: related-party suggestion. I run Lanes. No is a fine answer.

URL: https://lanes.news

Description: For eight conflict pairs (Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, USA and China, USA and Iran, China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan, UK and Argentina, Afghanistan and Pakistan), Lanes pulls coverage from each party's press and from press in countries that are not part of the conflict. Each party lane includes domestic outlets read in the original language (Russian, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Dari, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Spanish), not only English-language state services. It groups articles about the same events, then sorts each claim: corroborated (and marked independent or same origin, since ten outlets repeating one statement is not verification), framed differently, disputed, or reported by one side only. A rule check demotes any "corroborated" claim that lacks citations from both sides. Every claim links to the source article and every outlet carries an ownership note. Example: https://lanes.news/daily/afghanistan-pakistan/2026-09-25 lines up Afghan outlets (Ariana News, Al-Emarah) against Pakistan's Dawn on the Spin Boldak clash. Use case: seeing quickly which parts of a conflict story rest on one side's claims before going to primary sources.

Cost: Free.

Level of difficulty: 1 of 5. Pick a conflict, read the page.

Requirements: none. No account, no API key.

Limitations: Lanes shows what was published and by whom; it does not verify events on the ground, and overlap between sides is evidence, not proof. Daily articles are written by an AI model (Claude) from the selected articles and labelled "AI-compiled from cited reporting, not human-reviewed", so claims should be checked against the linked sources. Coverage depends on outlets with working feeds: few Palestinian outlets publish one, so that lane also carries regional outlets, and the site lists other gaps on its About page. The selection window is 72 hours with a cap of 8 articles per lane. No public API or bulk export.

Ethical considerations: the pages hold published news coverage, not personal data. Lookups are passive. State-funded outlets are included on all sides and labelled as such. Google Analytics loads only if the visitor accepts it.

Guides and articles: method at https://lanes.news/about and https://lanes.news/method/corroboration

Tool provider: Lanes, an independent project not affiliated with any outlet, government or party to the conflicts it covers. Contact: [email protected]

Similar tools: Ground News and AllSides compare left, centre and right coverage, mostly in US and English-language media; Lanes compares the parties to a conflict plus third-country press, including domestic-language outlets. Europe Media Monitor clusters multilingual news but doesn't align claims between sides. GDELT (which Lanes uses for its relationship map) is event data rather than a claim-by-claim comparison.

Dominant language
JavaScript
Stars
652
Forks
113
Avg merge
3h 46m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Getting set up

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from bellingcat/toolkit

All issues in bellingcat/toolkit

Similar issues

More JavaScript issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.