Tracking changes in a typical wiki-based repository is not an easy task. Of course, you have 'Changes' topic in most wiki implementation, but what is important is to subscribe to changes of topics of our interest.

One of the ways is to let browser track changes. You create a topic listing interested topics. The URLs generated for these topics should become different when topic changes - so browser will treat them as 'yet-to-visit' URLs. For this, wiki product authors should change the algorithm that generates URLs that includes its latest version.

But there is a problem: The URLs don't look clean (i.e. version information is otherwise useless. In fact, if it is stored elsewhere, you might end up seeing older version of topic, not the latest.

So a better approach is to simply create a macro that will generate URL with version. Or some syntactic notation such as Topic:latest. (Latest to be replaced by its version no.).

Any other suggestions?

permalink 9:39 AM