Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Real-Time Monitoring Alternatives

All the watchlist reports described so far in this chapter are snapshots of edits at a moment in time. Their information is current as of when you create the report, but they don’t update themselves as edits are made. If you want to watch edits as they occur, consider receiving real-time updates for pages you want to watch. You use either standard Web feeds, or monitor changes to pages on your regular watchlist using Lupin’s Anti-vandal tool (Lupin’s Anti-vandal Tool).

RSS and Atom

Wikipedia supports two kinds of Web feeds: RSS and Atom. A Web feed is an automated way to get copies of changes to Web pages of your choice. For example, you can sign up to get new postings to a blog, saving you the trouble of checking the blog every day. You read such notifications in a feed reader—also called a feed aggregator or just an aggregator—a specialized application on your computer.

For RSS and Atom, you have two choices. The standard way is subscribe to individual pages. But you may also be able to use a feed to get notification of changes to your watchlist, although none of the three options for that are well-developed (see the box on Standard RSS and Atom feeds).

Standard RSS and Atom feeds

The most straightforward way to get a Web feed for pages you want to watch is to subscribe on a page-by-page basis to those pages. As with additional watchlists (Creating Additional Watchlists), if you want to watch both a page and its associated talk page, you ...