Last modified: 2011-03-13 18:05:14 UTC
Currently the entery for each item in the RSS looks like this: <item> <title>Terri Schiavo</title> <link>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terri_Schiavo</link> <description>more additions</description> <pubDate>Sat, 18 Sep 2004 17:37:13 GMT</pubDate> <dc:creator>Pakaran</dc:creator> <comments>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Terri_Schiavo</comments> </item> An optional link= paramater should change the url written out in <link> to the diff itself, in this case: <link>http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Terri_Schiavo&curid=670910&diff=0&oldid=0</link> Since most people patrolling RC do so to check additions this would be much more useful than the current feed.
I'm actually working on including the diffs directly in the feed (currently in 1.4cvs).
The diffs in the feed are good, thanks, but not all i would hope for. The "link=" parameter would for instance allow the feed to be used with firefox's "life bookmarks" feature, which creates magic bookmarks from an rss feed, using the <link> tag as the taget and the <title> tag as the label of the bookmark. I like the idea of this feature, even though it's not so useful at the moment because of a lack of options. But i hope it will evolve, and i would like to be able to use it with the wikipedia. As a temporary workaround, one could also just add a links the diff and the history to the items content, before or after the diff itself. That saves not only two clicks but also the time it would take to load first the article and the the history, befor the diff is shown in the browser. In this context, i would also like to suggest to include information about the change in each items title. The name of the page alone is not a good title, because the *page* is not the news, the *chane* is. Thus, the item title should include information about the change, such as the username and the byte-difference, similar to what is used for the IRC channel #rc.wikipedia. This would be extremely useful for the "life bookmark" aproach, but also nice for "real" aggregators: as it is now, a single page will appear multiple times in the news list - frequently updated pages like logs etc will show very often. All those entries now have the same name - which is not very useful. Titles of the form "Article Foobar changed by User Quux, +523 bytes" would be more informative. Maybe i should file a separate feature request for that?
Given that the "Recent Changes" feed is designed to notify subscribers about changes, it makes the most sense to link each item to the change, not the original page. As a side-effect, it makes the feed work better with feed readers that index items by link in the absence of ID elements uniquely identifying each item.
See also bug 3998, which is about a similar problem with the ID element.
The list shows pages, and links to pages.
