Mingli Yuan, 05/06/2014 19:43:
If you visit the early page of c2.com, you will find the idea of observability is one pillar principle of wiki software, and just follow the idea, Ward invent the RecentChanges for all wikis.
Can you please find that specific page/formulation of the principle? I'd like to reference it from point 1 of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Principles but I couldn't find it with a quick search. (Note, it's not really *universally* accepted as a wiki principle.)
Some rather big software development projects have failed, recently, in ways that a simple checklist like the page above could have avoided. So this is an important conversation to have.
At that time c2 is very small; now Wikipedia is so big. The original idea of RecentChanges is not very effective today.
Nor in 2002. :) http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TooManyRecentChanges
We had made some extension for the original idea in our mediawiki software, but I think the step is too small.
Let's first take a look of what we had already invented are similar to RecentChanges but more effective:
- Wikizine or Signpost: community stories every week
- some part of a Portal: recent changes under a subject compiled by human
Still possible for other kind of RecentChanges which is not invented yet, for example:
- References and external links are very valuable resources, why not
extract them from articles and compile them into a timeline?
None of these escapes http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RecentChangesIsNotTheWiki ; some have failed before: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/RoleOfRecentChanges
Content is only one aspect to observe, people are another:
Attention, we're radically rooted in http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/ContentOverCommunity
- 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'm not sure that's the right question. Anyway, more reading: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/back=CategoryRecentChanges http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?search=RecentChanges
Nemo