This is an interesting topic about RecentChanges and its many uses and variants. I'm copying Analytics, EE and Research lists because I hope that some of our colleagues from these lists will hop over to Wikimedia-l to participate in this discussion. [a]

In particular I would call my colleagues' attention to this section of Mingli's email:

"Content is only one aspect to observe, people are another:

* Who are the experts on some topics?
* Who are my buddies on some articles?
* Who did help me to improve an article originally I wrote?

In all, we may reshape our technical infrastructure in this direction for new spaces of participation.

And finally, one open question for the system designer:
* Towards better content and community, what is the most important things we want our user to observe?"

I'll just note here some observability work on user contributions that has been done or is in progress.

1. User Analysis Tool [b], similar to the legacy tool by User:X!. Be sure to look at the "Future plans" tab.

2. Listen to Wikipedia [c] visualization tool of recent changes, mostly for aesthetics but there may be ways to adapt some of the ideas or code used here for other interesting purposes.

2. Snuggle [d] which is a tool that helps to identify good-faith and bad-faith new editors.

4. Finding a Collaborator [e] is a current research project, also see [f] a visualization example. As part of this work the researchers seem to have formulated a way of quantifying an editor's impact, although I haven't seen the formula yet. As you probably know the quality of edits and editors is a topic that gets discussed repeatedly.

5. WikiStats [g] which provides high-level statistics about Wikimedia projects.

6. WikiMetrics [h] cohort analysis, has a lot of potential for expanding its tool set.

7. For code and related technical contributions see [i].

8. There are a variety of tools next to users' requests at English Wikipedia's Requests for Permissions page [j] such as WikiChecker [k] and automated edits logs [l].

This is a good discussion and I would be happy to have an office hour meeting for live chat.

Pine

[a] http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-June/072507.html
[b] https://tools.wmflabs.org/supercount/index.php
[c] http://listen.hatnote.com/
[d] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Snuggle
[e] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Finding_a_Collaborator
[f] https://depts.washington.edu/reflex/
[g] https://stats.wikimedia.org
[h] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimetrics
[i] http://korma.wmflabs.org/browser/
[j] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_permissions
[k] http://en.wikichecker.com/user/?t=Jimbo%20Wales
[l] https://tools.wmflabs.org/xtools/autoedits/index.php?user=Jimbo%20Wales&lang=en&wiki=wikipedia&begin=&end=