Last modified: 2005-12-04 03:41:59 UTC
As I understand it, the RSS feed should be updated every 50 edits. However, much of the time, edits go missing in between updates and are never sent out in the feed. This greatly diminishes the usefulness of the feed. For example, I just checked two successive feeds and compared the results to Special:Recentchanges. There were about 25 edits missing which were made in the 18 seconds between the lastBuildDate of the first feed and the earliest pubDate of the second feed. This translates to about one third of all edits which never make it to the feed.
Upping severity.
The RSS feed shows the last 50 edits (possibly cached from some minutes ago), with no guarantee whatsoever of continuity. Due to the volume of edits on a site like en.wikipedia, I can pretty much guarantee that you will *not* get a complete, unbroken edit stream out of the RSS feed. You will get a view of the most recent edits -- that's what it's for.
Why not provide a longer RSS feed, with 500 edits?
(Reopening based on question I just asked.) :-)
Unnecessary and expensive. If you require real-time updates of Wikipedia changes, I recommend you use the IRC channels that were created for this purpose.
I thought it was a valid bug, that's why I fixed it. I just forgot to close the bug. The RSS feeds give diffs, that's the big difference between them and IRC. I implemented a diff cache which shares diffs between the ordinary UI and RSS, and I reduced the cache expiry time for the whole feed from 60 to 20 seconds, for en only, to hopefully eliminate holes. There's still more things that can be done to make this more efficient, but it's certainly ready for a trial.
