User:Semaphor/Working on MediaWiki and Wikimedia projects

• Startpage for Help: meta:Help
• Interwiki linking: meta:Help:Interwiki_linking#Project_titles_and_shortcuts
• Templates:
  • https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Template:Robelbox
  • Nice exmaple: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Assistant_teacher_course
• Icons (e.g. for illustrating articles):
  • https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Clear
• Toolserver: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Account_approval_process

Watchting pages

The consideration of this section are currently being brought to live in: v:User:TAOBot

Pages to start with: en:Help:Watching_pages, meta:Help:Watching_pages.

Goal: for v:en:TAO I am looking for an easy way to get notifications of page changes for the whole project (e.g. all pages (including talk pages) in the accordant category). There are several approaches however mainly on a per user basis, where a general "recent changes list" would be nice. There is also the desire to have a service performing a "push" to speed up interactions of the members of the project group.

(Besides that goal I'm documenting this here for my personal reference.)

Email

• Notifications by Email are unfortunately turned off (meta:Help:Watching_pages#E-mail_notification) on most projects. Danger and complications because of "email floods" too likely: en:Wikipedia:Help_desk/Archive_51#Watchlist_email_notification.
  • Reccomendations: External service for surveilling changes (e.g. via http://www.changedetection.com or Firefox plugins) or syndication (RSS etc).

More:

• http://toolserver.org/~luxo/gwatch/login.php not tested yet, account needed.
• http://toolserver.org/~tim1357/cgi-bin/wikiproject_watchlist.py eventually further investigation needed but seems to be coded only for the English Wikipedia.

Conclusion: focus on syndication as there seems no way to have (easy and quickly set up) email notification for a group of users (of whicht some having only obtained minor technical skills).

Syndication

en:Wikipedia:Syndication i.e. RSS- or Atom-Feeds. Alternatively teher ist the extension Send2StatusNet, that could perform similarily.

• Accessible through history page.
• Or by manipulating link (in your browser):

?action=history&feed=rss
?action=history&feed=atom

• Also available for user's own watchlist. See en:Wikipedia:Syndication#Watchlist_feed_with_token.

DOMAIN/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&wlowner=USERNAME&wltoken=TOKEN&allrev&hours=72&linktodiffs&feedformat=rss
DOMAIN/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&wlowner=USERNAME&wltoken=TOKEN&allrev&hours=72&linktodiffs&feedformat=atom

• i.e. a users actually personal watchlist also can be accessed by others which know the respective token.
• nice blog article on the topic: http://kristianrisagerlarsen.dk/wikipedia-watchlist-rss/
• Options can be found in api.php https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

Conclusion: with my present information one could have a dedicated user for the project who's watchlist is maintained an the according link is shared within the community. If prefered by the users diffs could also be "pushed" by email, not on a per user basis but for example to the mailinglist. --Semaphor (talk) 11:35, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

Include a "DynamicPageList"

mw:Extension:DynamicPageList_(Wikimedia)

<DynamicPageList>
category=Category:Software testing
suppresserrors=true
addfirstcategorydate=true
</DynamicPageList>