Many wiki engines have the ability to put the last few changes from RC
on the main page, or in the sidebar. MediaWiki will have this in 1.5,
with special page inclusion. There will be a whitelist of supported
special pages, currently Recentchanges, Allpages and (thanks to Erik)
Newpages. The syntax is e.g. {{Special:Recentchanges/10}} for the last
10 changes.
It's not currently known how many special pages will be supported by the
time 1.5 is released, or what their subpage-like parameters will be.
My main motivation for doing this was to allow the creation of a better
alphabetical index, similar to [[Wikipedia:Quick index]], for use in a
static HTML dump.
It would be nice to address the problem of internationalisation of
special page names and subpage parameters at some stage.
-- Tim Starling