YK: Chapter 10: Monitoring the wiki

10 Monitoring the wiki

Recent changes

The page Special:RecentChanges is extremely important; as you might guess, it shows the latest set of changes to the wiki. By default, it’s linked to from the sidebar, and it’s publicly-viewable. And by default, it shows the latest 50 changes, over the last seven days, and changes made by bot users (see here) are not shown. These settings can be changed within the interface itself, and the defaults can be modified by an administrator, though in general these defaults work fine.

Minor edits are shown with an “m”, and newly-created pages are shown with an “N”; and for every edit, the page name, revision time, user, edit summary (if any) and the number of bytes that were added or removed in this revision are shown. The display is similar to the history page (see here).

You can make the display of the Recent Changes page slightly more sophisticated, by going to your Preferences page, selecting the “Recent changes” tab, and then checking the option “Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist” (and saving). This will group together all recent changes to any one page on one line ­ so that, if there are many edits to a single page, it doesn’t end up overwhelming the Recent Changes display.

The Recent Changes page is crucial for monitoring recent activity. Conveniently, it’s also available as a feed, using Atom, which means that you can just add the feed to your RSS reader (if you use one, that is -- and if you don’t, they’re highly recommended). Then you will be automatically notified of all new edits at the same time that you check your news, etc. You can just go to the Recent Changes page and get the URL of the “Atom” link from the sidebar.

Watchlist

For larger wikis, monitoring recent changes is unwieldy ­ if there are more than, say, 10-20 edits a day, it becomes untenable to try to monitor all activity, every day. That’s when another page becomes crucial: the Watchlist page, at Special:Watchlist.

Every user has their own watchlist, which others can’t see. You can add pages to your watchlist in various ways:

There’s a “watch” tab at the top every page, which lets you add that page to the watchlist (or, if it’s already on your watchlist, remove it). On Wikipedia, this is instead just a clickable star icon ­ that’s a nice interface enhancement available by adding the following to LocalSettings.php:

$wgVectorUseIconWatch = true;

Logs

Most of the non-editing administrative changes, like the blocking of users, are logged, so that the history of those changes is preserved. (In most cases, these actions also show up in the Recent Changes page.) Each type of action is contained within its own log. You can see all of the logs at the page Special:Log, which is publicly-viewable.

Actions that are logged include creation of user accounts, blocking of users, page moves, page deletions, page protections, page imports, and file uploads. Some extensions also define their own additional logs, including Approved Revs, FlaggedRevs and LiquidThreads.

It only works when using the Vector skin, however.

Statistics

The Statistics page, at Special:Statistics, holds some nice top-level information about the wiki: the number of pages, the number of edits, the number of users in the various user groups, and so on. Figure 10.1 shows the top of the Statistics page for mediawiki.org.

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Figure 10.1 Special:Statistics page on mediawiki.org

Note the distinction between “Content pages” and regular “Pages”. The text that explains the two here is specific to mediawiki.org, though it’s fairly similar to the default text. This is often a cause of confusion, because the number given for “Content pages” tends to undercount the true number of content pages. This number only includes pages within the “content namespaces” (by default, this is only the main namespace, though that’s settable via $wgContentNamespaces). And it only counts pages that contain at least one wiki-link. Pages that don’t are considered “stubs”, and not counted. It’s not a perfect system, and it can end up undercounting severely, depending on the type of content you have.

When you edit a page, you can check the “Watch this page” checkbox, which adds that page to your watchlist. This checkbox is checked by default if you’re creating a new page.

You can directly edit the set of watched pages at Special:EditWatchlist/raw. You can also use the interface at Special:EditWatchlist, although that one only allows for removing pages, not adding them. Both pages are linked to from the top of Special:Watchlist.