WikiRssFeedIssues

The Issue with Wiki RSS Feeds

This began as a response to a post on Chris Siebenmann's wiki about blogs versus wikis. Chris asserts that blogs have an advantage when it comes to presenting and tracking changes. I have to agree with this, but I think the issue is mainly an implementation weakness of wikis. Wikis could present better change tracking interfaces, if the current wiki engines were improved.

I use phpwiki for http://www.hollenback.net, and it has a terrible rss feed. All the feed presents is page summaries, and those are just the one-line descriptions you enter describing the change you've made to the page. Note that some other wiki engines hopefully have other, better rss engines - if so I welcome comments to this post.

However, I believe this is an implementation issue, not a fudamental issue with wikis. Further I think that this could be fixed is a way that preserves the concepts of wikis - you don't have to make your wiki act like a blog.

However, I am not sure I agree that this is a fundamental problem with wikis - I think it's just a problem with the current implementations. Instead of just the change description, my wiki should be able to output the page content. I'd like to bee it output the first header and paragraph by default, along with an option to output the entire content of the page. This is easy to derive since the wiki engine knows the page content and structure. The wiki also knows which pages have changed for a given date range.

I also with my wiki rss feed offered categorization. If there were just some simple way to tag pages with keywords then you could construct category rss feeds easily. This could be done one of several ways:

1. Allow a special category: keyword wiki tag to appear by itself on a line, and use that when constructing category urls.

2. Present a separate category dropdown list for each wiki page. Every time you edit the page, you have the option of selecting a category from the list. The wiki engine then uses that when creating category rss feeds.

3. (the most wiki-like I think) Use the the wiki page path to derive the category. If a page is a child of the sysadmin page, put it in the sysadmin category.

Note that twiki does implement the last item, because it supports per-category (web in twiki lingo) RSS feeds. However I dislike this implementation because twiki webs are really meant to completely segregate incompatible content, not just allow simple categorization.

Any of these options would be relatively easy to implement, and would go a long way towards resolving the biggest problem I have with the rss feed of my website. The key thing I want is a way to construct category rss feeds, so example I could provide a sysadmin rss feed to Planet Sysadmin that wasn't polluted with my private ramblings.

another annoyance: inability to hide pages that are a work in progress.

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