Manual:$wgAllowCategorizedRecentChanges

From MediaWiki.org

Recent changes: $wgAllowCategorizedRecentChanges
Allow to filter the recentchanges by a category or one of its sub(subsubsub...)categories
Introduced in version:	1.6.0
Removed in version:	still in use
Allowed Values:	(boolean)
Default Value:	false

Other settings: Alphabetical | By Function

[edit] Details

Enable filtering of categories in Recentchanges.

From the mailing list tech-l:

Recent changes has become rather crowded with all that cursed popularity
of Wikipedia :-)

One often-mentioned solution was the ability to filter Recent changes by
categories. Well, now you have it!

It's turned off by default, no worries. To enable, set
    $wgAllowCategorizedRecentChanges
in LocalSettings.php

It uses my aforementioned class to determine wether an article belongs
to a category or one of its sub(subsubsub...)categories. Categories can
be entered on the Recent changes page, separated by "|". You can filter
for articles belonging or either any or all of the given categories
(OR/AND).

Once the usual authorities had a look at it, I'd like it to be enabeled
on some medium-sized wikipedia to determine the impact on the database
slave servers, which might or might not be severe.

I think this would be a very efficient way of managing our "RC patrol
forces" by dividing the huge amout of changes-to-be-checked into smaller
chunks.

What's missing is "articles that don't belong to any category". Yet!

Magnus

Compare applying Related Changes to a category: this seems to be the same as applying Recent Changes to it, except that the latter also shows changes in subcategories.