Sorry if this is already in the hopper or (!) has already been done, but it seems long overdue:
We need a way to compile, based on lists of links (I guess), "Recent Changes" lists for all articles about a general topic. I think this is actually a very pressing need that should have been taken care of long ago. (For the record, I asked for it probably a year ago or more.) The idea is that we'd be able to maintain lists of all articles on a given general subject, such as philosophy, and any changes made to any articles on the subject would show up on the recent changes page for that subject.
Why do we need this? At least one reason is it might help attract experts to the project. Just speaking for myself, I'm sure I'd spend more time on Wikipedia if there were a philosophy recent changes page. More importantly, the recent changes page has *always* been huge. It's now more cumbersome than ever and makes it hard for people to focus their attention, which would be a nice option. Lack of the feature also makes it hard to *monitor* goings-on in a general subject area.
With the relatively new mysql-driven software, this shouldn't be as difficult as it might have been before. One could compile personal lists using the "watch this page" feature; what I suggest is that we have publicly-editable and publicly-viewable lists of the same nature.
(Minor point: in a list of recent changes pages, I think there should be automatically listed the number of topics that are listed under a given subject. That'd give us an idea of how much more work there is to be done in adding to the list.)
I am not committed to any particular version of the feature, by the way. I'd just like to see it done. I don't want to have to wade through 5000 edits just to see all the recent philosophy edits.
Larry