Wikipedia Watchlist RSS Feed

Over the summer, I became a Wikipedista to some extent, mostly because I found their pages on Nicaraguan subjects pretty lacking. Since I'm an RSS junkie, one of the deficiencies of the MediaWiki software that was immediately apparent to me was that there was no way to get your watchlist as an RSS feed.

Now that I'm back in school there are so many things vying for my attention that I've mostly kicked the habit. Fortunately, while I was still active, I wrote a script that fetches my watchlist and returns it as an RSS feed, which can be passed in to NetNewsWire through a script subscription.

It's based on a PHP script that I found here. The original was localized to the French Wikipedia, and, it turns out, didn't work at all for the English one without some serious modifications to the parsing code. It also needed to be placed on a web server, which is less than convenient for most people. PHP has the ability to run as a command-line SAPI, so that problem was easily solved.

It's been up on my user page for months, and I have no idea if anyone uses it. It's been great for me, though. I can keep up with developments on the articles I care about without having to remember to check my (infrequently updated) watchlist. Enjoy.