WritersLog

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A Writer's Log is a FilteredRecentChanges: it is like RecentChanges except that it picks one or more authors and shows what else they have been writing.

This can be used to answer questions such as:

What else has this person been writing? (Either because they are interesting authors, or clumsy newbies, or because they are presumed vandals. It helps VolunteerHousekeeper?s.)
Combined with the VersionHistory: Who has written to the page recently, and what else have they been writing?
When searching for hostname patterns: Which editors would be affected by banning a certain pattern?
Getting to know you: spend time working with someone who you've enjoyed working with before: Great for promoting BarnRaising on large wikis

Should a wiki offer up this sort of information? Is it an invasion of privacy? See UserStalking for a discussion.

In WardCunningham's original implementation, combining page history and writer's log, the log shows quite vividly how a wiki conversation revolves around a few pages. Still, is this dialogue what wiki is really about?

A long and detailed RecentChanges list is good enough to show who is who and where the conversation is currently concentrating, provided that the wiki has fairly low levels of activity. However, this is inadequate on a busy wiki: if there are a thousand changes a day, then tracking someone who only edits at the weekend becomes essentially impossible.

In order to safeguard the RightToVanish, allow users to opt out of having a writers log when they exercise their RightToLeave. For example, allow users to limit the log to posts they have made in the last month, or allow them to disable the writers log if they have not posted for a month.

Implementations

MediaWiki
Oddmuse implements a filter by (one) username or host (regular expression) for recent changes.

CategoryRecentChanges CategoryIndexingScheme CategoryWikiTechnology CategoryUncommonWikiTechnology

WritersLog

Implementations

Discussion