Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

I agree that MediaWiki should be more XML friendly. The current xml output of,
say, Wikipedia is quite strange, and requires a lot of further string parsing.
You should be able to get an RSS feed of all articles in a particular category,
of all subcategories in a category, using the same parsing classes that are
already in MediaWiki, in combination with an XML serializer. It is a big
project, but a very important one, because open content models like Wikipedia
should make it as easy as possible to use and process the content as possible.

I think having RSS feeds of any/every/most content pages would be great. I could
certainly use the feature for mediawiki when used as a docu tool... 

I found this tonite, worth mentioning... not sure if it works or not:


http://wiki.case.edu/CaseWiki:RSS_Feeds

It is a page about generating rss feeds for almost any page (at least category
pages). Check it out.

See also: bug 472, bug 943, bug 4182
[Perhaps we could do with a "component" or a tracking bug for Feed (RSS/Atom)
issues?]

(In reply to comment #0)
> At the moment, as far as I know, mediawiki doesn't allow many options for RSS.
> Many people have had to write scripts. I think that MediaWiki should incorporate
> an RSS maker that has options such as where to divide different items, what to
> put in the summary, etc. I realize this would be a ginormic project to
> undertake, which is why I'm setting the priority to low, so if one of the
> developers is bored, feel free to do somethihng like this.

Could you elaborate on how this is supposed to work?

I'm saying that when you're [most likely the webmaster/dev] making a feed...you 
have an interface where you can tell it:

--What page the feed should be coming from [let's say WP:Reference Desk]
--How to seperate the 'articles' [A few preset options, such as headlines are 
titles and text is the articles, and then maybe a regexp field to add your own] 
(so let's say in the RD we want headlines [==...==] to be titles and a snippet of 
the text to be a summary)
--How to date the fields [I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to find the first timestamp 
to make a date field, and the last timestamp to make an updated fields, but 
perhaps give the user an option on which timestamp they want]

Then the software would take this and update the feed [once every hour, day, 
month?].

Also, a feature could be added to support 'pages in x category' or 'pages with x 
template' (the latter could be useful for wikinews).

And since this could be locked down to only the webmaster/developer it wouldn't 
consume server resources if the webmaster is bandwidth conscious enough. I'd help 
out with this project, but every day I find that i know less and less about PHP :\

If it's the case that the developers would be doing it, it would probably be
less effort for them to code a specific extension to provide the required feed.

But then the end user (non-wmf) would have no access to this feature because they'
d have to code it themselves as well

Turning this into a tracking bug.

Would it be possible to include the categories of a page within the RSS Feed for
recent changes?  I've seen most people just create multiple rss category nodes
within each item.

I think that most of what you say can already be done with Semantic MediaWiki: http://semantic-mediawiki.org/

There are plenty of matched for RSS in bugzilla that are not linked here. I would create a separate component 
( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/describecomponents.cgi?product=MediaWiki ) called RSS/Atom/Feeds or something...
just feeds? RSS?

Adding 'tracking' keyword.