I thought we might discuss the purpose, and future, of the "Recent Changes" page here.

The idea of the dynamically generated Recent Changes page was to provide to people a view of the pages that had been modified recently. This was before RSS - I suspect many are using the RSS feed for this purpose now.

Then, of course, when a wikignome or someone else makes a sweep through a group of pages, correcting spelling, adding Categories, etc. then the Recent Changes page is swamped with pages in which some are interested but others are not.

In the past few weeks, a new dynamically generated page was created to collect pages that have been "cleared". Wikignomes should be certain to keep an eye on that page, so that if someone decides to clear a useful page, repair can be effected rapidly.

An ongoing discussion has been a way to separate "minor edits" from normal changes. Here's a few comments I had on this topic:

1. IMO, if the end result makes doing minor editing harder, people are likely to stop doing it - and if that happens, the wiki is likely to become less popular.

2. Please don't do anything that is browser specific - I can't be the only person in the world who primarily accesses the wiki through either IE (while I have firefox, it is likely that will disappear in the upcoming months, thanks to the mental 'virus' of microsoft...) or lynx. Also, as someone mentioned, I am supposed to limit access from work (might reach the point of having access banned altogether) and then public computers (library, coffee houses, etc.). The public access machines often have as much, or more, limits than my work machine.

3. You will likely find this is a matter of social engineering, rather than tcl software engineering. What I mean is this. There are many ways to implement some kind of division of edits. However, if people forget to mark things, or in the case of some people, if they think their changes are not 'minor', then the problem will still exist. Also, we want to be certain that the work of spammers can't be hidden by marking it as minor edits.

4. Put the checkbox down by the save button. The closer the better. That may be obvious to everyone. However, I think of, for instance, the wubwiki's problem report page, which isn't something that you all designed. However, note that of the 10 problems reported so far, several leave the "one line summary" line without filling it in, probably because it is overlooked when trying to get at the main purpose.

Having the check box down near the save button might be a way to catch someone's attention. Also, there should be a link to a page discussing what constitutes a minor edit.

I would presume a minor edit would include fixing typos, or fixing a broken page reference, wiki text formatting, and, from the rabble rousing I've seen, the adding of categories or the splitting/reformatting of pages.

Some things that I would think wouldn't be considered a minor edit would be the addition of new external references or addition of new content to the page,