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Introduction

The recent changes stream is a live, public feed of activity on all Wikimedia wikis, including Wikipedia, available in over 270 languages. Using the recent changes stream, you can build applications on top of the massive amount of realtime data from Wikipedia. This data powers projects that identify trending news topics, sonify and visualize Wikipedia edits, monitor edits from US Congress, and more.

Connecting

An application can connect to the recent changes stream with a SocketIO client. First, connect to stream.wikimedia.org/rc. Then, subscribe to any Wikimedia wiki in the format [language code].[wiki].org.

For example, to connect and subscribe to English Wikipedia:

var socket = io.connect('stream.wikimedia.org/rc');
 
socket.on('connect', function () {
  socket.emit('subscribe', 'en.wikipedia.org');
});

You can also subscribe to a list of wikis:

socket.emit('subscribe', ['en.wikipedia.org', 'de.wikipedia.org', 'es.wikinews.org']);

Or subscribe to all wikis, with *:

socket.emit('subscribe', '*');

See a full list of available wikis and languages.

Using the recent changes stream

Each action is delivered as a change event. A change event may describe an edit to a Wikipedia article, a new page creation, a user registration, or other various log actions.

var socket = io.connect('stream.wikimedia.org/rc');
 
socket.on('connect', function () {
  socket.emit('subscribe', '*');
});

socket.on('change', function (data) {
  // Handle each change...
  console.log(data);
});

TODO: add a live widget, such as: http://jsfiddle.net/7rgxxkok/11/

Change event details

Parameter Description
comment A description of the action. For edits, this is the value of the user's edit summary.
wiki The source wiki's shorthand name.
server_name The source wiki's server name.
title The page title for the action.
timestamp Timestamp, in seconds.
server_script_path The source wiki's path, which is helpful for finding api.php for other queries.
namespace The MediaWiki namespace for this action.
server_url The source wiki's URL.
length For an edit action, this is an array with the byte size of the new and old version of the page. For a new action, the old value is null.
user The username of the user who submitted this change. For unregistered users, this is their IP address.
bot Whether the user who submitted this action has a bot flag.
type Values may include edit, log, or new.
id The id for the action within the source wiki's recent changes table (TODO: verify?)
minor Whether the action has a minor flag.
revision For an edit action, this is an array with the revision id for the new and old version of the page.
patrolled Whether the action has a patrolled flag. Only present for new and edit actions. (TODO: verify?)

The following parameters are only present for log-type actions:

Parameter Description
log_action Values may include create (new users), move (changing a page title), hit (triggering an abuse filter), or delete (removing a page).
log_action_comment A description of a log action.
log_id TODO: What is this?
log_params An array of additional params related to the log_action.
log_type TODO: How is this different from log_action?

TODO: verify against MachineReadableRCFeedFormatter.php and the RecentChanges table.

SocketIO client libraries

More information

Learn more about the setup and operations of the recent changes stream:

  • RCStream, which broadcasts socket.io events for each change
  • MediaWiki's $wgRCFeeds, which handles recent changes updates