New Notification

With so much traffic in wiki this week I was finally driven to add new notification to RecentChanges. Imagine my surprise when the mod turned out to be only one line.

  my $isNew = " (new)" if $old{rev} == 1 or $rc{text} =~ /\t\* $title \(new\) /;

The heuristic says that a page is new from revision 1 until it is lost from the RecentChanges page. -- WardCunningham

That's the PerlLanguage for you; People have done some amazing APL one-liners too. In fact KenIverson offers an encyclopedia of (mostly) one-line programs as a supplement to this APL sequel, the JayLanguage.

Some thought:

1. Since RecentChanges isn't generated on the fly every time, the only way for the "(new)" notification to be lost is for it to be deleted off RecentChanges entirely. That means, no one has to talk about it long enough that it gets lopped off the top of RecentChanges. Since this is unlikely with certain discussions, a page may remain "(new)" for weeks if it never leaves RecentChanges. Indeed, this happening right now.

2. I'm not sure NewNotification is a good idea. Old pages that people touch don't have the flashing "(new)" next to them and may be passed by. If you think about how you think, you don't recognize every new thought that came your way as "new". (see ThingsOnWikisMind) Especially to the exclusion of old ideas that refresh and inform. We'll have to watch and find out.

: Actually, I disagree. As a fairly new arrival here, I realize that there is a lot of good stuff out there to read, most of which I haven't seen. The signal-to-noise ratio is much higher on older, well-worked pages. So I tend to PREFER the pages on RecentChanges that do NOT have the "(new)" next to them. -- MichaelChermside

3. It may be that NewNotification is inspiring people to create new pages that they shouldn't. It may be a personal thing, but I feel that some of the new pages lack the QualityWithoutaName. They're usually not focused, or seem to not have the same focus as the rest of Wiki.

See:

CategoryWikiConcept