Relevant Changes Discussion

Problem:

RecentChanges fills up with pages which are not about People, Projects and Patterns.

Solution:

Create a page called relevant changes which contains the paged accumulated during a calendar week which are Categorized under topics generally accepted as being useful for most participants, or those related to specific areas initially described when this wiki was set up.

The page is

maintained by a Sponsor or Sponsors
provides a place where those interested can find pages which are grouped under relevant topics.
resides in a file which is intended to be edited by the sponsors.
presently constructed via a manual operation, perhaps a script could construct it automatically once a day (at least).

Current Solution Collaboration BrainStorm

How does one decide which pages are 'relevant'?
- The sponsor makes his/her own observations, first by classifying by titles, then later refining by content.
A new WikiTag? RelevantChange? type tag?
- No
How does one exclude pages that are vandalized or newbie edits?
- Sponsor excludes from the list

A side effect of such a ListPage, is that the Changes page would contain listings of Pages under a Topic or Classification. It can be a Roadmap which newcomers and veterans alike could use to check out what things were happening without having to sort through the TestPages, PageDeletionWars and other such pages.

For other suggested solutions see

ImplicitTopics - see page contents for summary
WikiCurrentTopics - aim to list a few pages each month
ThingsOnWikisMind - not maintained for years (observation late 05)

First of all, I think it's a great idea, so kudos to Donald (or whoever came up with it if it's not Donald). It's such a great idea that it deserves to be automated somehow, so in any case it is intended to be one of the features in WikiChangeProposal (if you excuse the plug). Second, it's such an interesting coincidence that this idea that is rediscovered anew (just like wcp was rediscovered anew) and the first who pioneered is still CliffordAdams, see SignificantRecentChanges [the original has a spelling error], ChangeSummary, ChangeSummaryDiscussion. So history repeats itself in very interesting ways, hopefully not like in GroundHogDay?.

The risks involved are political disagreements and disagreements on what's relevant and what's not, but I think bickering over such things is not very relevant now as relevant changes is unlikely to have approached the popularity of normal RecentChanges (quick, new and other varieties). If anything, I think the controversy is based on the high expectations people have to get this thing "right".

-- CostinCozianu

I would suggest a different analysis. For each category in CategoryCategory, create a page that contains a list of RecentChanges of pages only in that category. CategoryWikiRecentChanges, or possibly RecentChangesByCategory might be an example. This could be auto-generated, and would allow people to search for changes by category. If you like, this can be augmented by a new category, CategoryCoreTopic, which can be put on those pages strongly related to PeopleProjectsAndPatterns. Now you automatically have relevant changes. -- gnome

And you could even highlight the topical parts by looking if they have a topic tag of the current month. -- GunnarZarncke

Er, if it's in recent changes, doesn't that make it topical?

That would be a good feature, particularly if implemented also in the RSS feed, to support AggregationOnTheClient. I still think that a human edited relevant changes would be useful in addition to that. -- Costin

[Now that I have looked at this page a few more times, I think the concept is a good one, especially if gnoming work is filtered out first (manually?). I don't know whether people here is familiar with related work elsewhere, similar to PageClusters and a filtered RecentChanges on MeatBall and CommunityWiki. There is always room to RefactorTheWheel.]

[And I should suggest a RecentRandomPages list of 50 pages, to be sourced on the Filteredrelevant changes over a 52 week period, and regenerated weekly. The target audience would be someone who comes here every month or so for a visit.]

With the explosion of information and the number of places many people visit, it is a GoodThing if a means of managing information such as is proposed here is continued.

NovemberZeroFive

CategoryWiki