User blog:Meighan/Tracking Contributions: Wiki Activity

Update
Hi all, we made the decision to make these blog posts into articles so we could better turn them into Guides for new users (and old users who would like to brush up ;) to easily find. You can find them here.

Blog Post
Wikis by nature have a lot of activity on them. Once a wiki starts to attract a community -- whether that's two or three people or hundreds of people -- a lot of action can happen over any period of time. Editing, uploading an image, writing a blog post, leaving a comment, adding a new page, asking a question in a forum -- so much can happen! Because anyone can come and edit (and add any of the above contributions and more) it’s useful to be able to find all of that activity in one place.

As a good admin, it's important to monitor the activity on your wiki for a number of reasons. The main reason is to see what is being added and edited. This is your space, your community -- it's important to see what exactly is being edited and by whom. Two tools used to keep track of wiki changes are Wiki Activity and Recent Changes. Both of these features are useful tools for this task.

In this blog installment I'll be discussing Wiki Activity. In the the next installment I'll be covering the more technical feature Recent Changes or as it's known out on the proverbial streets of Wikia: RC.

Wiki Activity:
Wiki Activity is a tool located at Special:WikiActivity, or on each page of your wiki in the upper right hand corner. The button looks like this: Clicking it takes you to Wiki Activity within the wiki you are on. It looks like the image below:



From the image above we can see: a new forum was added, a blog comment was made, a talk page message was left and a forum question was answered. If we'd like to explore the contribution more we can click on the detail icon to bring us to that specific action on the wiki.

Speaking of icons, curious about what these icons mean? Good, we like curiosity! To the right is a list of what each icon stands for. Once you become familiar with them, they'll indicate what is taking place on your wiki with a quick glance.

Think of Wiki Activity like a key to reading your wiki. It lists many of the contributions happening on your wiki in chronological order with specific info: icon, action, author, time, any other relevant info (images, summaries, categories) along with a link to the action on the wiki. Wiki Activity shows all of these updates in one place. (If you are on a wiki you do not admin and just want to check out pages you follow -- you can do that too. Just click on 'Followed Pages only') It also scrolls endlessly with a click of a button. You can also find Wiki Activity by being redirected through Special:MyHome. A shortcut to Wiki Activity is by adding it to your My Tools on the tool bar so it's easily accessible all the time.

That's Wiki Activity! Did we leave anything out? Let us know or tell us what you like best about Wiki Activity in the comments below. This will be a weekly feature here on Founder & Admin Central about how to best use your wiki and the tools we offer, so please tell us what you want to hear in the coming installments below. Next week we'll focus on the more technical feed of Recent Changes.