Wikipedia gets RSS feeds

I'm a huge fan of RSS feeds, in part because they're perfect for niche media. You don't have to publish every day to earn your way to my reading habits. Just make sure you've got a feed and if your focus intersects with my interests, I'll subscribe. When you publish I'll get it--no need for me to bookmark it and make a note to check it regularily. (I've written more about this here).

At this point virtually everything I read is via a feed, with one glaring exception--my Wikipedia watchlist. It's the only bookmark I still use. So I was delighted to discover this morning that finally Wikipedia has feeds! Thanks to Steve Rubel for the heads-up:

Wikipedia has added RSS feeds to the 1.25 million entries in the encyclopedia. This means you can now more easily track the revision history for important articles, such as those about people, brands or corporations. Simply click on the history link at the top of any entry page and you will see the RSS link on the left hand side

Comments

[Ben]

Yes, wikipedia's feedless existence is long overdue. How great will it be when we can have feeds for personal relationships, that way I never have to hear unecessary nagging, bragging, or shagging again:)

-Ben

[Glenn Fleishman]

Call this the new death pool. Someone can just aggregate every name of any importance from Wikipedia via RSS, and note when any feed adds the word "died" or a death year. Just one application, but I would guess a popular one--especially among journalists.

[Tim]

I sort of liked feeds - but missed the graphic design of the sites I was reading; that alone didn't stop me from using them, but I also have concerns about the constant polling of RSS aggregators and the bandwidth being used for that. We need some sort of "ping to aggregator" service that notifies subscribers when a new entry is available so they can read it when it's ready.

[Matt]

I wanted to point out that, like Wikipedia, we recently launched RSS feeds for every artist in Rhapsody. Now, if you’ve got a favorite artist, you can use these RSS feeds to get automatic updates whenever Rhapsody adds new music from that artist or when new playlists are uploaded featuring music from that artist.

From our perspective, this makes music discovery via Rhapsody virtually effortless, and takes the onus off consumers to actively seek out new music from their favorite artists via the service.

It’s pretty easy to find these feeds. Just go to Rhapsody.com, search for an artist, and click through to that artist’s page. On the right side of the screen, there’s a link for [BAND] feeds (ex. Stereolab feeds). You can also manually add feeds; the convention for the feeds is pretty easy -- just type http://www.rhapsody.com/BANDNAME/rss.html (example: http://www.rhapsody.com/stereolab/rss.html). From there, you can access several feeds per band.

[S.I.]

Thanks for the heads up on this, Chris. I got the news about wikipedia's newsfeed from reading your feed. Natch.

[Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya]

Wikipedia also has an API which allows you to fetch your watchlist itself as a RSS/ATOM feed. Here and here are two scripts that you can use to access this API.

Unfortunately, the feeds that are returned do not seem to be updated very regularly right now.