Wiki favors tending its own rather than publishing breaking news from others. But can this chasm be crossed? We ask, what sort of stream of news might flow from a well tended garden?
# Activity
Servers track edits and report in sitemaps update-indexed inventories of pages in their garden. The Activity plugin reports a reverse-chronological summary of change.
A recent server modification now considers forks to be uninteresting from an activity point of view. However many more uninteresting edits leak thorough.
This confusion between activity and news spoiled the RSS feed provided by the original wiki back in the day when news feeds were something and readers common.
Wikipedia's edit stream flows out of their garden via internet relay chat and now some more modern event mechanisms. See Edit Music for where this has been visualized/sonified as art.
# Reports
We've hypothesized that work in wiki could be easily reported in wiki though a process of quoting and refactoring as status floats up an organizational hierarchy.
We've experimented with establishing a reporting heartbeat applied to specific pages by including a publication schedule that is made manifest with a countdown timer rendered with the report subscription list.
Server-side code included algorithms to compose a summary from the story and journal. This might be a useful approach for reporting updates on a different kind of feed. github
The Reports experiment failed to have success before conversion to node.js broke the server-side scripts and intense spam abatement created many hurdles for mechanical creation of posts.
# Likes
Site operators add social-media buttons that encourage readers to declare there like for what they are reading to their own social network. source
Social network marketing has proven reader endorsements as an effective way to build traffic. Likewise platforms like Facebook and Twitter encourage these mechanisms because they too reap the boost in attention.
The wiki page footer could offer like buttons for popular social media platforms. The click-logic has been reimplemented so many times one can't be sure what the button will do. A respectful thing might be to pop-up a dialog promoting a page with an editable synopsis and link.
Were marketing is concerned policy follows profits so solutions here will require constant attention.
# Boards
We have imagined a Pinterest-style infinite-scrolling what's new board as a standard part of every site. This would be driven by fetching sitemaps to find activity and fetching pages to find images and more sitemaps.
Boards are attractive because they can be implemented in pure javascript were a mini version of web scraping logic provides most recent content first. Rosters, References and Journal citations will grow the board's breath as needed.
See Garden's Meet where we consider the streaming that occurs when we meet.