(I sent this to a couple of lists already, but i though it might also be interresting for the research community)
Hi all! For a long time I wanted a decent push interface for RecentChanges-Events, so it becomes easy to follow changes on a wiki. Parsing messages on IRC is unreliable, and polling the API sucks (and is also unreliable, see Bug 24782).
So, I have written XMLRC http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XMLRC and set up a prototype on the Toolserver - have a look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Recentchanges_via_XMPP for details. Basically, you point any Jabber client to the chat room enwiki@conference.jabber.toolserver.org to see the change events, like on IRC. However, if you use a client aware of the extra data attached to the messages, like http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:XMLRC/rcclient.py, you will get all the information you can get from the API (in fact, you can get the exact same XML tag).
Try it out and let me know what you think!
-- daniel