Discussion of user notifications about changes on Wikidata (with Brandon Harris)
- Users need to be notified about changes to data items used on a page they watch.
- That is, a corresponding entry should be injected into recentchanges and show on the Watchlist (and RelatedChanges, the RSS feed, etc)
- a new notification framework is being implemented for mediawiki, perhaps we can used that: mw:Echo (Notifications)
- Echo could be generalized to also cover server-to-server communication, so we could use it as the sole mechanism of pushing changes to the client wikis.
- we may also want to insert a (null)revision into the page history
- we'd need two extra fields: rev_external_change_size and rev_external_change_data; these would provide sufficient info to generate a diff for the data change.
- Data diffs are loaded from the repo via the api and displayed on the local page's diff page using rendering code in WikibaseLib.
- If a span of several revisions is diffed, including both text and data edits, the text diff is shown in one section and the data diff is shown in another.
- diff/rev navigation works as usual.
- how about permalinks?
- how about viewing old revisions? can we show the corresponding old state of the data?
- once we have all this working, can we do the same for templates and images?