What
FilteredRecentChanges is a general term encompassing many sorts of filtering that could be applied to
RecentChanges. Some pages which are specializations of this concept:
The easiest kind of filtering to implement on a wiki is to filter on the granularity of pages, rather than to filter individual Changes or individual comments.
Why
- Different people have different interests; not all RecentChanges are interesting to all people.
- Different people have different levels of time available on different days. This is my biggest problem. There are some pages whose changes I will look at if I only have a a couple of minutes (like my homepage, or a page I have recently posted on). There are other pages that I will look at only if I have some time. Filters could help one keep up better when I only have a little time, rather than disappearing totally for a month and then coming back (and not having the old change logs available anymore).
- Manual filtering is inevitable; no one has enough time to read every change. Why not provide tools to help people do what they are already going to do?
See also FilterMore.
Reasons not to have filtering
- If different people see different Changes, there would be less SharedGround? for a community to form on. Different subcommunities may evolve different communal norms, setting the stage for later conflict.
- If the reason for filtering is differences in interests, it might perhaps be best just to divide the wiki into multiple wikis.
- It becomes harder to interpret silence. Have many people seen what you've said and not posted anything? Or are most people filtering the page upon which you have posted?
Implementations
OddMuse has something like this, right Alex?
Technical comments
Put filtering meta-info on page vs. decouple it from page
I think filtering meta-information (similar to categories) should not be on the page itself. Putting filtering information on the page discourages you from "slicing the information" in lots of different ways (because it adds more crud to the page). For example, it would be impractical for me to put "CategoryBayleShanksPick??" at the bottom of every page that I liked (because if everyone did that...). If the filtering information is stored elsewhere, however, this becomes practical. (this is related to the idea of a SectionedPage).
-- BayleShanks
CategoryRatingSystem
CategoryUncommonWikiFeature?