From the Dept. of Dreams:
What I would really like is to be able to "subscribe" to a specific Wikipedia article and be notified **in a manner of my choosing** when updates occur.
via Bloglines, another RSS/news reader, via email or an IM / irc msg, etc...
I realise I can create a WP account and then my own custom watch list, but quite frankly this ain't cutting the mustard for me (Dept. of Dreams, right ;)
I have more than enough passwords, accounts and pages to check on a regular basis, and I would generally like to have less not more. To put it bluntly, I don't want to have to login and check a wikipedia account...
Is there a way to do this?
Sort of a ....
WP watch list to *anything*
convertor / service....?
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
Minty wrote:
From the Dept. of Dreams:
What I would really like is to be able to "subscribe" to a specific Wikipedia article and be notified **in a manner of my choosing** when updates occur.
via Bloglines, another RSS/news reader, via email or an IM / irc msg, etc...
I realise I can create a WP account and then my own custom watch list, but quite frankly this ain't cutting the mustard for me (Dept. of Dreams, right ;)
I have more than enough passwords, accounts and pages to check on a regular basis, and I would generally like to have less not more. To put it bluntly, I don't want to have to login and check a wikipedia account...
Is there a way to do this?
Sort of a ....
WP watch list to *anything*
convertor / service....?
Why don't you write a script that monitors the History page of a Wikipedia article and takes appropriate action when it notices something has changed? I don't think Wikipedia needs to build in this function (imagine the amount of email it would be sending out if it was like that). I currently use cURL to grab my Recent Changes list for local viewing.
- -- Edward Z. Yang Personal: edwardzyang@thewritingpot.com SN:Ambush Commander Website: http://www.thewritingpot.com/ GPGKey:0x869C48DA http://www.thewritingpot.com/gpgpubkey.asc 3FA8 E9A9 7385 B691 A6FC B3CB A933 BE7D 869C 48DA
What I would really like is to be able to "subscribe" to a specific Wikipedia article and be notified **in a manner of my choosing** when
updates occur.
via Bloglines, another RSS/news reader, via email or an IM / irc msg,
etc...ENotif - Email notification for page changes
see http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=454 and http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enotif
- available for CVS HEAD 1.5, and several 1.3.x. version - and soon for 1.4 - I am working on this
Regards, Tom
On Apr 4, 2005 9:34 PM, Minty mintywalker@gmail.com wrote:
What I would really like is to be able to "subscribe" to a specific Wikipedia article and be notified **in a manner of my choosing** when updates occur.
via Bloglines, another RSS/news reader
As for RSS (& Atom, etc), see lots of previous posts on these lists [this one & mediawiki-l]. Or rather, don't bother, because they can be summarised thus: * people like the idea of RSS-ised watchlists * people like watchlists to be private * an RSS feed for watchlists could be made pseudo-private by having a random token in its URL, and only activating it when the user first asked for it (and, presumably, giving them the option of re-randomising or disabling it) * feed aggregators don't, in general, support secure connections, but I think some do, so that's another option; not that MediaWiki can use that kind of login yet either, mind you
See also http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=471,472,943 - 472, for instance, discusses turning individual page histories into feeds, for a more fine-grained kind of "subscription" which wouldn't suffer the privacy problem.
See also http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=471,472,943
- 472, for instance, discusses turning individual page histories into
feeds, for a more fine-grained kind of "subscription" which wouldn't suffer the privacy problem.
Ta for the pointers :)
I don't think any of the bug reports quite get there, but "individual page histories into feeds" is exactly what I was thinking about [1]
To be all fashionable about it, it's the "long tail" thing. There are a lot of people who, between them, are interested in a lot of articles. But on average there is only going to be one or two people passionate about one given article.
At the moment, we are assuming either
- a (relatively) few people monitor lots of pages - lots of people are going to login and check their (small) watchlists fairly regularly
Imagine I am interested in the "random weird topic" page. I'd like to be notified of updates to this page, but I won't be checking in daily just in case.
Email alerts would be perfect, and I note that it *could* be a wonderfully seperated (ad sponsered) service (low traffic for the user, relevent ads, useful service, entirely independent)
Ok, why the WP-tech list?
[1]
This only happens if it is easy (and or massively popular, which it isn't right now)
It could be done in a couple of ways.
WP offering RSS feeds of page histories is one. It's not optimally efficient use of server resources or bandwidth. WP sending out emails to users itself is another, but ... core business ... focus ...
Anyone could, given the interest (ad revenue), set up a site/service that would easily let me "bookmark" a wikipedia page, and deliver this service. It still presents problems about such an organisation polling a bunch of pages every day or so. Yes, you could block them, but why block a service that is mutually usefull all round?
Someone like Bloglines could (with arrangement) download the DB nightly and then email out daily updates. More efficient all round.
Bloglines (or similar) is a commercial company, so I'm sure they might help with the logistics of a daily DB dump. This then benefits everyone in the community.
I'm in no way associated with bloglines, other than as a end user of the service. I'd also be quite happy with any other solution.
There are a bunch of articles I am interested in, but I won't be logging in to watchlist them. That might mean I am lazy, and so be it. But some form of RSS feed of page histories would be a really neat feature to have.
On Monday 04 April 2005 22:34, Minty wrote:
From the Dept. of Dreams:
What I would really like is to be able to "subscribe" to a specific Wikipedia article and be notified **in a manner of my choosing** when updates occur.
via Bloglines, another RSS/news reader, via email or an IM / irc msg, etc...
this is easy:
you just need a very small IRC-bot that listens to the bots posting changes in #enrc.wikipedia channel at freenode.
such a bot can do whatever you want it to do - send you emails, notify you via IRC, serve HTML for your browser, "auralize" changes to certain pages with samples of bird voices..
daniel
Daniel Wunsch wrote:
On Monday 04 April 2005 22:34, Minty wrote:
From the Dept. of Dreams:
What I would really like is to be able to "subscribe" to a specific Wikipedia article and be notified **in a manner of my choosing** when updates occur.
via Bloglines, another RSS/news reader, via email or an IM / irc msg, etc...
this is easy:
you just need a very small IRC-bot that listens to the bots posting changes in #enrc.wikipedia channel at freenode.
such a bot can do whatever you want it to do - send you emails, notify you via IRC, serve HTML for your browser, "auralize" changes to certain pages with samples of bird voices..
daniel
Hoi, What if the article is not on #enrc.wikipedia channel ?? It is funny that it is often assumed that there is only wikipedia :) and therefore as now only one channel .. Thanks, GerardM
On Apr 5, 2005 8:40 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, What if the article is not on #enrc.wikipedia channel ?? It is funny that it is often assumed that there is only wikipedia :) and therefore as now only one channel ..
Actually, http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_channels lists 13 recent changes channels; I've no idea if that is up-to-date, so there may be less, or even more, but it's certainly not true that there is only one.
Obviously, if it's somebody else running a MediaWiki, they'll need to be running their own IRC bot, but that's perfectly possible (the bot, IIRC, is in the MediaWiki CVS repository).
It occured to me that polling Recent Changes, based on the time since last polling is maybe another solution to this.
What I like about this is that, if it was implemented:
- It would automatically work for *any* MediaWiki installation - It would not be hard to add support for other wiki implementations - It's entirely external to MediaWiki (no code changes) and should be fairly low-impact (poll once per hour?)
You are then free to offer a variety of services to an unlimited number of users
- email on each edit - email no more than once per hour/day/week/month - email after 5 (or more) edits - sms / text to mobile/cell phone [1] - IM / irc of any variety - update rss feed
[1] In the UK you can do reverse billing, which means WP could earn money when WP sends an SMS to someone, assuming the someone has signed up for this service. I suggest this would be a way to raise revenues for WP and could be run as an entirely independent project.
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org