On 6/5/2014 10:43 AM, Mingli Yuan wrote:
If you visit the early page of c2.com, you will find the idea
of observability is one pillar principle of wiki software, and just follow
the idea, Ward invent the RecentChanges for all wikis.
At that time c2 is very small; now Wikipedia is so big. The original idea
of RecentChanges is not very effective today. We had made some extension
for the original idea in our mediawiki software, but I think the step is
too small.
Let's first take a look of what we had already invented are similar to
RecentChanges but more effective:
* Wikizine or Signpost: community stories every week
* some part of a Portal: recent changes under a subject compiled by human
I think this is potentially a very interesting topic. I did think it was
curious that the Signpost would be one of the first things that came to
mind, since I wasn't really thinking about RecentChanges as a model when
I created it. And in general, it's interesting to note that these
examples all involve human work product rather than software features,
even though RecentChanges is a software feature.
RecentChanges is definitely a core element of what we understand wiki
software to be, so it's a good place to start. And there have definitely
been other features in MediaWiki that extend the idea in ways that (for
some purposes) may be more effective. Examples might include:
* Logs (essentially a filtered version of RecentChanges based on events
meeting predefined criteria)
* Watchlists (another filtered version, but this time based on
user-defined criteria)
I invite people to brainstorm more examples of this principle at work -
Pete's were again primarily social and community-based, but at this
level of discussion we should be looking at both social features and
technical ones. That would be a useful exercise with which to reexamine
where we have gaps, and identify opportunities for new applications.
In all, we may reshape our technical infrastructure in this direction for
new spaces of participation. And finally, one open question for the system
designer:
* Towards better content and community, what is the most important things
we want our user to observe?
Well put. This is a critical issue that we should work on answers for in
order to plan future development, both social and technical.
--Michael Snow
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