{"id":720,"date":"2006-07-16T12:19:34","date_gmt":"2006-07-16T12:19:34","guid":{"rendered":"\/ifbookblog\/?p=720"},"modified":"2006-07-16T12:19:34","modified_gmt":"2006-07-16T12:19:34","slug":"wikipedia_provides_rss_for_art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/2006\/07\/16\/wikipedia_provides_rss_for_art\/","title":{"rendered":"wikipedia provides rss for articles"},"content":{"rendered":"

As noted in The Long Tail<\/a>, RSS feeds have been added to Wikipedia articles. The feeds can be accessed by going to an article’s history page – links for RSS & Atom feeds are on the left side, under the “toolbox” heading.<\/p>\n

They’ve done a good job with these: instead of sending you a new copy of the article every time changes are made, as is the case with most blogging software, the feed explains exactly what’s changed. Here’s a sample of what they look like. It’s not the most intuitive presentation if you’ve never edited Wikipedia, but it is useful once you learn to decode it:<\/p>\n

\"wikipedia<\/p>\n

This is from the Wikipedia article on Susan Sontag<\/a>; the feed is here<\/a>, though the speed at which the Wikipedia changes suggests that you may no longer see these edits. This is actually two entries (the newest first) documenting a change that I made: I noticed that one of her books had been categorized incorrectly so I moved it to the correct category. In the bottom entry, I deleted Where the Stress Falls<\/i> from the Monographs section: on the left side is the Monographs section before my deletion, on the right side in Monographs after my deletion. In the top entry, I added Where the Stress Falls<\/i> to the Essays section. On the left is the section before my addition; on the right is the section after. The brackets, asterisks, and single quotes are the markup style used by Wikipedia. The yellow background is added to a new paragraph; green denotes a deleted paragraph. If you change existing text, changes are in red, much like MS Word’s track changes feature. <\/p>\n

How useful is this? It might be too early to say: RSS is a useful building block, and once it exists, interesting uses tend to present themselves. I suspect it will prove most useful to casual Wikipedians, who update a small number of articles on a regular basis but don’t spend most of their time in the Wikipedia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As noted in The Long Tail, RSS feeds have been added to Wikipedia articles. The feeds can be accessed by going to an article’s history page – links for RSS & Atom feeds are on the left side, under the “toolbox” heading. They’ve done a good job with these: instead of sending you a new copy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[275,822,1629,1804,2016],"tags":[3070],"class_list":["post-720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-change","category-history","category-rss","category-syndication","category-wikipedia","tag-wikipedia-rss-syndication-change-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/720\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureofthebook.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}