A few days ago, someone pointed me at
http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/newgrow.htm
which is a dynamically-updating count of the number of records in the Online Computer Library Center's "Worldcat" library card catalog. Also -- this is the cute part -- there's a listing of what the most-recently-added catalog entry at any given instant actually is. Naturally it occurred to me that it would be fun to have the same sort of thing for Wikipedia.
So I dummied something up at
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cgi-bin/wikitracker.cgi
This is a demonstration only. The implementation is somewhat of a kludge, since it's implemented "outside" of mediawiki, without any direct access to the database. And I'm not proposing that anything like this get officially added to mediawiki, either; it's just food for thought.
I'm going to leave the demonstration running today (November 8) *only*, so if you try the "wikitracker" link after this date, it'll be stale.
On Wed, Nov 08, 2006 at 09:37:47AM -0500, Steve Summit wrote:
http://www.eskimo.com/~scs/cgi-bin/wikitracker.cgi
This is a demonstration only. The implementation is somewhat of a kludge, since it's implemented "outside" of mediawiki, without any direct access to the database. And I'm not proposing that anything like this get officially added to mediawiki, either; it's just food for thought.
Let me just say that that's pretty cool. It might be pretty spiffy, if the code and the load both permit, to gin that up into something that was MAGIC, and could be parked in either a mainpage, or a skin...
Cheers, -- jra
We already have Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages which shows pretty much the same. Except that they're lists, not a single one. Some bugs in your approach: you're listing redirects, which can show ugly. Some titles show url-escaped (with % instead of parenthesis). I guess the "nice" feature is the autoupdating. It can be implemented but should be done on its own page (i.e. not on a section of the screen: many users won't want it updating from the web, and it'd be tons of extra bandwidth). Note this feature can be [externally] implemented with a 0% extra load over wikipedia servers, problem is on being able to attend the load (quite easy if you don't reveal it ;-) ). Plus you should be aware of people opening it on a tab and leaving it open (forgetting) on background so it'd hit the server for nothing.
On 11/8/06, Platonides Platonides@gmail.com wrote:
We already have Special:Recentchanges and Special:Newpages which shows pretty much the same. Except that they're lists, not a single one. Some bugs in your approach: you're listing redirects, which can show ugly. Some titles show url-escaped (with % instead of parenthesis). I guess the "nice" feature is the autoupdating. It can be implemented but should be done on its own page (i.e. not on a section of the screen: many users won't want it updating from the web, and it'd be tons of extra bandwidth). Note this feature can be [externally] implemented with a 0% extra load over wikipedia servers, problem is on being able to attend the load (quite easy if you don't reveal it ;-) ). Plus you should be aware of people opening it on a tab and leaving it open (forgetting) on background so it'd hit the server for nothing.
it would be quite easy to listen to the ircstream and update from there.
henna
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org