Another Suggestion of How Wikimedia Could Use Feeds
Some of Wikimedia’s sites have contributors who, well, need an editor. Their content is great, but they may not have a very good grasp of the language in which they are writing; they may not be writing in a way that is stylistically compatible with Wikimedia’s guidelines; they might be like me and ramble on and on and on ad infinitum and everyone who reads what they write can think of twenty different ways to be more succinct and they wonder why I can’t just write better. Some of Wikimedia’s volunteers probably know which authors may need some extra help. It could be very useful if there was a way to have a feed of someone’s contributions, especially regarding new Wikinews articles or Wikipedia entries. I’m sure the Wikimedia folks have already thought of this and listed it on one of their wishlist pages somewhere.
March 29th, 2005 at 4:02 am
Hi J. It’s not possible to have a RSS feed of individual’s contributions, but you can use the ‘User contributions’ on the lower left hand side of ‘User pages’ to see what someone’s been doing. It’s quite easy to just leave that page open in a Firefox tab and click refresh now and then, or if you use the excellent Tabbrowser Extensions (’TBE’) you can set individual tabs to reload!
BTW have you dropped by Wikinews lately? It’s really flying now. About twenty articles a day at the moment, and the number of people subscribed to my RSS went up by 100 over the last week!
March 29th, 2005 at 1:48 pm
Clarificiation for those who don’t know much about feeds and how they work: The way Wiki(news, pedia, etc.) is now, it is not possible to get a feed of an individual’s contributions. However, with XML feeds in general, it is possible for someone to get a feed of a particular author’s work if there is some attribute in the XML code indicating who created or last edited the page.
Getting a feed of someone’s contributions is much easier than leaving a browser window open forever and clicking reload or having it refresh all the time, although that will have to do for the time being.
I actually, uh, visited Wikinews the other day. I heard there’s some kind of contest happening similar to Survivor where people need to contribute an article a day to be in the running for it. I’ve heard things are really hopping right now. It’s worth a look.