Linuxtv wiki needs email notification/more email-ready users

Hi there,

after a while I decided to come back to the linuxtv wiki to finish organizing the bazillion dvb-t usb devices in a way that helps
a) normal users to find out if a certain device is supported and
b) developers to update information on the drivers they manage.

Some preview of this can be seen on my playground page:
http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/HLPlayground2

As this is a more complicated way of storing the information than just plain tables, I'd like to keep an eye on changes. Not because of fear of vandalisim but because changes to the templates/date potentially have effects on a lot of pages.

There are some people who day by day put a lot of effort and work into the wiki and I'd like to thank them all for their continuing effort. I myself have only occasionaly time to update information there and I miss a lot of changes, even to the pages I watch, because the "watchlist" and "recent cahnges" reaches only seven days back. Manually going through the pages on my watchlist (currently 57) is not what I'd call good use of resources.

It would be great if it was possible to get (immediate/daily/weekly?) change notifications by email in order not to lose track of what is happening to the pages that I care about. (I bet this is standard functionality of mediawiki or at least one of the more common extentions.)

Also I'd like to encourage new and existing users to add their email address to their profile AND to check the "Enable e-mail from other users" box. Maybe we could change the default to enable that box?
That way it is possible to ask for missing details if somebody adds a new device, or to send hints if somebody writes in an article that a certain device doesn't work. Or to simply write a short note when removing some information like "Hey dude, I just removed some information that you added to article X because it is already contained in article Y. Instead I've added a link to Y. Thank you for your help and keep up the good work!..."

Also developers could ask people who are interested in a device's driver to check out a new version as soon as it is ready.

All in all it would improve the user experience and the quality of information on the wiki as feedback would not have to go through the "discussion" pages.

I went that way when talking to some other wiki admins about my efforts to unify the usb dvb-t data and the experience shows that wiki's are not a good medium for serious discussions.

cheers
-henrik

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These are good suggestions that Henrik has made. I would encourage others to also step up and try to find ways to implement them (along with any other improvements that can be made to the wiki and other sources of V4L-DVB documentation and website -- the website, in particular, really could stand for an overhaul).

(Note - at present I do not have time to take on further work, nor do I personally really want the responsibility of being the point man for such changes ... as it stands, I'm interested only in finishing off ventures I commenced long ago ... or introducing changes that are personally enjoyable to myself to make)

I also note that from prior discussions with Henrik and Jim (and Henrik is absolutely correct that discussing things from within the wiki quickly becomes difficult to follow), and from prior times with Micheal and Devin on irc, that we were touching upon the idea of a database. One such example that I recently came across, and that is worth further investigation by someone (and, again, that someone does not include me), is that model used by dd-wrt for their supported hardware (i would link, but it appears that their server is down at the moment).

Hi Henrik,

In searching for something else, I came across this recent thread on the mediawiki m/l:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2009-October/032214.html

There are a few suggestions in it (I just skimmed through). Perhaps one of them would be good to implement.

Hi,

I took a look at those but in doing so I've (re)discovered the automatic rss feed that each page generates. Those rss feeds can be polled by services like feedmyinbox.com to generate a daily report.

Our Mediawiki version does not yet have the ability to generate RSS feeds for users' watchlists without them being logged in (I've seen that feature on MW 1.16beta on the iPodlinux.org wiki though), but I am happy enough with the general "Recent changes" and the individual pages' feeds.

Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction

cheers
-henrik