📋 Issue Type

Bug Fix / SEO Quality

🎯 Objective

Fix the wordCount: 0 metadata bug in data/news-articles.json where 225 out of 668 articles (34%) report zero word count. This affects SEO structured data (Schema.org wordCount), quality metrics reporting, and article quality scoring.

📊 Current State — Evidence

Measured: 225 articles in data/news-articles.json have "wordCount": 0

{
  "slug": "2026-02-24-legislative-push",
  "file": "2026-02-24-legislative-push-en.html",
  "lang": "en",
  "headline": "Sweden Bolsters Civilian Defence...",
  "wordCount": 0,   // ❌ Should be ~1500-2000
  ...
}

All 14 language variants of recent breaking news articles (#485) have wordCount: 0.

The actual articles have content — news/2026-02-24-committee-reports-en.html has ~2239 words, but data/news-articles.json reports 0.

Root cause: The word count is calculated correctly in scripts/generate-news-enhanced.ts (line ~505) during article quality scoring, but this value is not persisted to data/news-articles.json. The news index generator (scripts/generate-news-indexes.ts) creates the JSON entries but doesn't read back the word count from the HTML files.

For agentic workflow-generated articles (breaking news from realtime monitor), the article HTML is written directly by the agentic engine without going through generate-news-enhanced.ts at all, so word count is never calculated.

🚀 Desired State

1. Calculate word count during news index generation (generate-news-indexes.ts) by:

   • Reading each HTML file
   • Stripping HTML tags
   • Counting whitespace-delimited tokens
   • Writing the result to data/news-articles.json

2. Propagate word count to Schema.org structured data in the article HTML:

   { "@type": "NewsArticle", "wordCount": 1500 }

3. Update quality metrics to use actual word counts for quality scoring.

🔧 Implementation Approach

1. Update scripts/generate-news-indexes.ts to read HTML files and calculate word count
2. Populate wordCount field in data/news-articles.json entries
3. Add word count calculation for agentic-workflow-generated articles
4. Run npx vitest run and verify
5. Regenerate data/news-articles.json with correct word counts

🤖 Recommended Agent

code-quality-engineer — fix metadata generation pipeline

✅ Acceptance Criteria

• data/news-articles.json has accurate wordCount for all articles (not 0)
• Word count calculation strips HTML tags before counting
• Agentic workflow articles also get word count populated
• Schema.org wordCount in article HTML matches JSON metadata
• Existing tests pass (npx vitest run)
• Quality metrics reporting reflects actual word counts

📚 References

• Word count calc: scripts/generate-news-enhanced.ts lines 503-506
• Index generator: scripts/generate-news-indexes.ts
• Data file: data/news-articles.json (225 entries with wordCount: 0)
• PR evidence: 🔴 Breaking: Sweden files five propositions on civilian defence, psychological violence — 2026-02-24 #485 (all 14 breaking news articles have wordCount: 0)
• Quality scoring: scripts/generate-news-enhanced.ts lines 487-560