Forum:Recent changes feed in the sidebar

I suggest adding a small recent changes feed to the desktop sidebar, showing the last 4 edits made to content namespaces. Each edit would have links to the page itself, the diff, and the user who made the edit. This suggestion is inspired by a recent talk by Weird Gloop's Cook about turning readers into editors, which I found very insightful (here's a recording, this topic in particular is talked about at 43:26). This has already been implemented in various wikis, such as our fellow RuneScape Wiki and Old School RuneScape Wiki, so you can take a look there to see how it works.

The benefit from doing this would be showing readers that the wiki is an alive place, written by people like them, as recent edits would no longer be "hidden" in a technical page that most readers won't ever check. On the other hand there is of course the risk of it being a prime target for vandals, but this issue could potentially be mitigated by updating the feed every few minutes instead of being really "live", and by hiding reverted/undone/rollbacked edits. As always, we can just remove it completely if we see it does more harm than good.

If implemented, it could be placed directly above or below the "Wiki community" section. The "Recent changes" link from the first section would be removed as it would be provided by this new section. The "Franchise" section would also be removed as I'm pretty sure there are some sidebar length limitation related to ad placement in the future, but let's be honest that section is completely useless anyway.

--Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 00:47, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Let the discussion begin! --Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 00:47, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Support, this can and will be a great addition. Obviously the recent changes feed would need to be tweaked for this wiki, if necessary. – RedX (talk) 00:53, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Support, great feature, franchise section is ultra useless compared to this and does not need to exist. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
01:02, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Support. It looks great on the RuneScape wikis. The feed doesn't appear to be live, which I think is implied in the intro, but it doesn't have to be to serve its purpose. One suggestion I would make to help potential editors would be to put a link to Minecraft Wiki:How to help either below "Show more...", or at the top of the Recent changes page to help readers who have never edited a wiki before. Rampage455 (talk) 01:30, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

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 neutral. I think if implemented it should definitely filter by namespace and by edit tag and have a 5minute+ delay to avoid noise and possible vandals appearing to readers.  Nixinova  T ⁄ C  01:33, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Neutral Per Nixinova. also cause i'm not understanding too much the difference of this to the Special:RecentChanges and will it affect the recent changes tab. I apolgize if im not looking at it correctly but i am a little confused. 👁 Image
Redstone Engineer (T/C/S/M) 13:40, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Special:RecentChanges is a page you must click on. Readers are not going to click on it. The sidebar thing exists to display prominently to readers the significant editor activity. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
13:48, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

OH! I get it now. that is a great idea. 👁 Image
 Support. 👁 Image
Redstone Engineer (T/C/S/M) 13:49, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Information – what's the benefit for editors and people who know how wikis function? I remember hearing about one of the reasons about leaving Fandom was about bloat: with recent changes being part of it. Would it be a toggleable choice?
Anyways, I 👁 Image
 support adding it. I remember being really fascinated by what changes were being made and where on wikis so I'll be glad to recreate that experience for other readers :) 👁 Image
Ayaan 14:23, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

I'm conflicted on this idea. The moment Cook has presented this idea on the livestream I felt it is inelegant way of bringing the potential editors to the world of wiki. It looks ugly, it's crammed in wrong place (very thin bar), it reminds me of flashy wikis that need to have "fancy" stuff all over to show how cool they are. I still hold this view. It's especially funny to me, to see creatures being both for removing wiki news section from the main page and adding Recent Changes to the sidebar, even though the main argument for both is the same, and the idea of wiki life being in prominent place is true for both.

To rephrase argument used in argumentation for removing wiki news section (this is my quote that I've changed from original) "Simply put, I do not think wiki recent changes feed is anywhere close to useful enough to justify being crammed in here. I know we as editors feel that recent edits section is an important thing to highlight, but please put aside your bias and think as a reader. Yes, recent changes could be interesting, but realistically is this what you came to the wiki to find? The recent edit to the wiki? No, you were not looking for that at all if we're being honest. Someone looking for that is most likely an editor, and they will find that on the Special:RecentChanges."

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 Support the idea of bringing more of wiki life to readers, but 👁 Image
 Oppose implementation where RC feed is crammed into sidebar, I do not believe that should be the function of sidebar. I'm looking forward to have my opinion changed though. Frisk (talk) 14:25, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

It's cute that you copied my argument as some kind of "Gotcha!" but my forum post was based on the fact that our main page is too cluttered and needs to be changed. The recent changes sidebar section would remove a useless section, not changing the overall size of the sidebar or amount of sections.

It also just is not ugly or crammed in the wrong place, I don't know what evidence could even be made for that when looking at OSRS Wiki, it's perfectly integrated. We have different sidebar design of course, but its width is identical so there's no reason why there'd be any difference. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
14:57, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Your forum post defined a problem of clutter on the right bar of main page, you've came to conclusion that the changes made to the main page resulted in "quite an overwhelming mess". So that was the problem you were trying to solve. As solution to the problem, you've provided removal of wiki news section, and argumentation for removing that section was the one I've copied to my response here, which included the idea, that sections on the main page (including wiki news) must be "useful enough" to the readers, making an argument, that the readers here come for information on Minecraft (correctly recognizing the usual reason creatures visit the wiki) and that we shouldn't put wiki information in plain view because it's not as important to the reader.

I believe it is worth pointing out, because both that section as well as this proposal have same reason for existence and yet result in two different attitudes from same editors. It is important to me that we do not weaken reader to editor conversion by removing wiki news section, and I also want to understand why in this case bringing the wiki editing to readers is "useful enough" to be considered.

As to "uglyness" and argumentation against that I've provided, I admit it's fairly subjective judgement. I dislike simplified RC feed of this kind, it's devoid of reason for edit, it often shortens the entire entry with "…" when nickname or page is too long to fit. I get that the idea is just to interest reader in understand what's going on the wiki, but this section being so devoid of context on what it is is not helping the case I feel. Which is why I dislike this implementation. Frisk (talk) 14:01, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

I really do not like that you refused to speak my name in your initial comment despite it being about saying I'm a hypocrite.

The wiki news section and the recent changes are editor-focused and therefore simply cannot be directly useful to readers. Readers will never be actively looking for that information, so they will never find direct use in them. The difference comes from a few things.

1. I think the recent changes sidebar actually has a good chance to improve on reader to editor conversion, while I struggle to see the wiki news section doing that tangibly (and in the event it does, arguably could cause an annoying obsession with user rights). The recent changes sidebar section is literally showing off edits happening right now with people's names. It is blatantly advertising editors to everyone on the site. I genuinely cannot imagine a better motivator for getting new people to edit than that. Everyone gets to think "I am editing, and some reader is seeing that I am editing".

2. While inherently stuff like this will not be directly useful to readers, it is at least far easier to imagine how recent changes may be interesting to readers. It's literally just showing off edits. Readers are on a wiki, it is genuinely nice to be directly told "hey look, there are a bunch of editors, the wiki you are on is active and therefore up to date". Wiki news does not have the tangible benefit of telling people the wiki is active.

3. The sidebar is not cluttered. The main page is cluttered. Editor-focused stuff is inherently worse than reader-focused stuff, but if the sidebar does not need its amount of sections reduced then I am naturally not going to be as hung up about it being as useful as possible. For the main page, I am going to hung up not having the least useful section, because the main page needs something removed. Yeah, I want the Franchise section removed, maybe that counts as a counter to what I'm saying here, but I genuinely think it manages to be less useful than wiki news because it just does not do anything at all. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
15:27, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

You bring up people not being here to find recently edited pages, but in my experience readers generally do enjoy seeing something "hot off the presses". On OSRS wiki there is a slight increase of article feedback(from anons) to pages which show in the RC sidebar (I don't have numbers or proof, but this is a trend noticed by multiple admins there). This indicates to me that people really do pay attention and click on those links. It may not be their primary purpose for going to the wiki, but I've never seen it listed as a downside by a reader. Mudscape 👁 Image
talk 15:03, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

Oh, it wasn't clear enough from what I wrote. The rephrased argument was one taken directly from removal of Wiki news section from the main page discussion and rephrased to fit this discussion, however I do not argue for it (quite the opposite). The purpose of it here was to show how it could be applied here by the very same creatures supporting this suggestion and removal of wiki news section which similarly to me, is important for that reader -> editor conversion. Frisk (talk) 15:10, 26 May 2026 (UTC)

I feel that a pretty significant difference from the wiki news section is that the wiki news section is generally only updated every few months, and for the most part it only contains "bureaucratic" news that would be of little interest to the majority of readers, such as mediawiki updates or new administrators. --Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 13:35, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Now I'm curious, what do we define as "interesting" to readers and on what basis? Why is administrator promotion less interesting than last few edits chronologically to the wiki? I'm not sure I understand the way of thinking here. And I don't think the interval at which the section is updated is this impactful in goal of turning readers into editors, getting them to be interested in editing the wiki, seeing that it's made by anyone on the Internet. Frisk (talk) 13:43, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

I thought we were keeping wiki news and adding recent changes? 👁 Image
Ayaan 13:44, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

One does not exclude the other. This forum is exclusively about adding a recent changes feed to the sidebar. --Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 13:45, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Personally speaking, I try to put myself in the shoes of someone who is reading the wiki casually and doesn't know how a wiki works. In this case, I feel I would be less interested in seeing "oh this guy has been appointed admin 2 months ago" than "oh this guy edited this content page 2 hours ago", because an administration promotion only really affects the fabled "wiki team", while a content edit is something more tangible which has a direct impact on the content I use the wiki for. It's entirely possible I would completely ignore the recent changes feed anyway, I'm not pretending my gut feeling is the absolute truth and I'm aware it's probably a faulty way of thinking. --Capopanzo (talk | contribs) 13:53, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your reply. Truth is, we don't have the data on this, so this conversation can only go as far as "I think x is more interesting based on anecdotal evidence" back-n-forth. I think worth noting is that we decided of contents of Wiki News section, and it doesn't have to be limited exclusively to "x got promoted", "MediaWiki got updated" but could also include achievements the wiki community has reached showing large scale of the wiki and how many creatures are involved in creating it.

The reason I think even administration promotions are useful in reader -> editor conversion because to me, as random readers - I don't know those nicknames. I ask who are those creatures. The forum thread is exposed, after a click I get to discussion on how the process went. Many nicks, many links I can click and see who actually responded in RfA. It's the initial interest that can be hooked. I do agree with the concern that an image of the fabled "wiki team" may appear in someone's mind seeing word administrator, though it still serves purpose of bringing the "community" forward to the reader even in this case assuming careful wording of entries in that section.

Either way, back to the proposal at hand, I think bringing recent changes to the reader is not necessarily a bad idea except maybe the angle I have as CATS member, where it would create additional incentive to do vandalism in order to appear on the feed (by making the feed so accessible and global, OSRS wiki really does have a vastly different community and distribution of good faith to bad faith edits, for it to be a good comparison, and while we can make API show only patrolled edits, reverted edits are marked as patrolled and would show up in the feed AFAIK), but the positioning of the RC is still a major point of contention for me. Frisk (talk) 14:24, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Oppose — There is already a link to the recent changes page. The sidebar is already bloated as it is, so any changes to it must be about trimming the fat, not about cosplaying Fandom. If we are to attract more readers that would edit the wiki, maybe add more links to relevant help pages? — BabylonAS 14:02, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

This proposal would replace a section of the sidebar, not even making it longer (maybe longer by 1 line). The link to recent changes is one of 29 (for logged out users who haven't expanded/collapsed sections) links in the sidebar and conveys nothing about how active the changes actually are. Not to mention that the Special:RecentChanges interface is frankly overwhelming for people who aren't used to it and also shows things like file moves that are likely uninteresting to someone who isn't an editor. You suggest linking to help pages, but why would anyone click on a help page? How is that interesting to them? Showing a feed of active changes is very likely to be relevant to people when new content is added (people are more likely to be looking for those pages, and those pages are more likely to be edited at the same time). And when we are between drops/snapshots/whatever, it still has the chance to highlight some of the more obscure topics that we cover (Old versions, obscure removed mobs, etc). Mudscape 👁 Image
talk 15:12, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Why the sidebar specifically? This thing could just as well be on the main page, there is no need to shove it into all pages. The linked help pages would be about editing the wiki; here I took inspiration from Wikipedia. — BabylonAS 15:33, 27 May 2026 (UTC) (Last edited on 15:43, 27 May 2026 (UTC))

Another point of opposition from my side concerns the implementation: from what I've heard on Discord/Zulip, there is going to be some sort of caching requiring a CloudFlare worker, an implementation that will be opaque to wiki users (similarly to the IWB ad; there is no page in the MediaWiki namespace to control its location or content, which would have made sense for a genuine commercial ad but not in this case). The other alternative seems to be using a gadget, but this requires JavaScript (though how many people disable it?). In either case, it strikes me as incongruous that a sidebar section should require so much technical setup outside of MediaWiki:Sidebar, though this might be a small nitpick of mine.

Tying into the above, I would also oppose any form of link click tracking in such a feed, or in fact anywhere else (navboxes, anyone?), which is an other idea mentioned on Discord. Again, it comes to the opacity of implementation (where do I find what kind of links have their visits tracked, and under what tracking category are they?) and the problem of accessing collected information; there would be no special page like Special:Analytics or Special:SearchDigest, thus only Weird Gloop staff could share this. Also, no matter if there would be no person identifying information collected, the mere fact of such tracking could put privacy-conscious visitors off and maybe contribute to the view of us undergoing "Fandomification" after leaving that site.

Still awaiting reasons on why should this feed be in the sidebar instead of the main page. — BabylonAS 06:14, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

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 Neutral leaning towards oppose. I just don't feel comfortable having my username, link included, being visible from any page on the entire wiki any time I make an edit 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
^(he/_they) 14:39, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Thats a good point, the user text should not be linked so noobs don't end up trudging through a namespace they don't understand.  Nixinova  T ⁄ C  21:18, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

I would agree that usernames should not be put on the front, just a link to the edit itself, if this ever gets implemented. — BabylonAS 07:37, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

I think the actual name of the user itself is fine as long as there's not a direct link. The name would make it more personal, which I think would drive up engagement. TheCaptainYaya (talk) 07:39, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

While I do agree with that, personally, it still makes me uncomfortable 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
^(he/_they) 16:35, 29 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Support - I think its a good thing to try and has a lot of potential to highlight the activity of our community. On the off chance it doesn't do well then we can remove it. Mudscape 👁 Image
talk 15:13, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Agree Yes, why not, I think it would be very useful. 👁 Image
AmirT(talk | contribs) 15:40, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Support I've always liked this when I saw it on the RS wikis. Plus I've always wanted the "Franchise" section gone as well. But regarding sidebar length: The "ad" (currently just IWB promotion) is currently placed above the "Franchise" section, and the sidebar can get arbitrarily long after that.

(Reminder for implementation: The code that adds the "ad" to the wiki would need to be changed, since it currently looks for the "Franchise" section) | violine1101 ^(talk) 21:26, 27 May 2026 (UTC)

Speaking of the IWB ad, maybe it's better to hard-code its location after the second block instead of looking for a specific HTML identifier? — BabylonAS 08:18, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

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A great idea. Vandalism can be stopped faster this way, and all recent activities can be logged Maxxxx Dirt Eater Alt (talk) 13:40, 28 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Support If anything, it would definitely add some variety to the sidebar, and while being able to see recent changes is important, it's not so important that it is the very second thing on the sidebar. FluffyGuardian70 (talk) 19:26, 30 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Support I get the concerns but if anything goes horribly wrong we can always switch it off. Dianliang233 (talk) 08:13, 31 May 2026 (UTC)

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 Strong support, I don't mind how it is styled or functions as long as most vandalism doesn't show there. MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk) (contribs) 👁 Image
11:24, 1 June 2026 (UTC)

Exactly! That’s also why I think it is useful. Maxxxx Dirt Eater Alt (talk) 01:43, 2 June 2026 (UTC)