API:Recent changes stream

A core MediaWiki feature is all changes to pages are visible. You can see who made what change to a page. On an active wiki, the overall pattern of activity is as interesting as the specific changes to pages: you can see spikes in overall activity, sudden interest in particular pages in response to news events, when editors are active, etc.

All activity on the server appears in Special:RecentChanges. So you could reload this page and scan it to look for patterns. But there's a better way.

stream.wikimedia.org broadcasts all changes to all public wikis run by Wikimedia Foundation over the standard Socket.IO protocol.

How it works on Wikimedia wikis
For years, the one recent change feed was and sent to an Internet Relay Chat daemon on irc.wikimedia.org that broadcast changes on IRC channels.

In 2014, developers added another feed sent to a simple "RCStream" daemon at stream.wikimedia.org that broadcasts changes over Socket.IO.

This allows anyone to write a visualization of recent changes, such as

How it works in the MediaWiki code
When MediaWiki writes a change to the RecentChanges page, it also calls. The lets you configure different kinds of recent changes feeds, with different kinds of formatting. includes/rcfeed in core has their implementation. If you run a wiki of your own and would like to adapt these visualizations and monitors to it, you can enable similar feeds to a similar client that publishes changes over WebSockets or on an IRC channel. As usual, all aspects of WMF's setup are free and open source.