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Include HTML meta tags for pages' Atom/RSS feeds in article view mode
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Description

Author: Wiki.Melancholie

Description:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed?action=history is offering 4 web feeds, Atom/RSS for RecentChanges and Atom/RSS for the page's feed.

On [[Web_feed]] (wgAction = "view") the page's feeds are missing. Most people do not want to watch the rapidly changing RecentChanges, but only one or two articles of their own. Either both feed groups should be shown here, too; or just the page's feeds!


Version: 1.21.x
Severity: normal
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

Details

Reference
bz13955

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 10:12 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz13955.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Hi Melancholie! Sorry that nobody has taken a look at this report yet and given feedback.

It took me a while to get an idea what exactly is requested here, so I'll try to summarize with my words:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed?action=history on the left (under "Toolbox") nowadays only offers "Atom", linking to
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_feed&feed=atom&action=history

There is no such link on the left for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed .
Taking a look at the HTML for that page, there is the line
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Wikipedia Atom feed" href="/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&amp;feed=atom" />

I guess the request here that this link should not point to the generic "Special:RecentChanges" but to the specific feed for this page's history only.

(In reply to comment #1)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed?action=history on the left (under
"Toolbox") nowadays only offers "Atom",

Indeed, it seems RSS support has been dropped. I believe it used to be available as well in the past.

linking to
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Web_feed&feed=atom&action=history

Well, there are actually two feeds; the "Wikipedia atom feed" is also present, just not visible in the page as a link.

There is no such link on the left for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed
Taking a look at the HTML for that page, there is the line
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Wikipedia Atom feed"
href="/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&amp;feed=atom" />

It is not necessary to actually look at the source code of the page. A browser that supports native feed detection (Firefox does, Chrome doesn't) will light up the feed button that will display a feed subscription page if clicked on. If there is more than one feed (as is the case of the history view), clicking the button will show a dropdown box with all available feeds.

I guess the request here that this link should not point to the generic
"Special:RecentChanges" but to the specific feed for this page's history
only.

As I see it, the request is to enable the page-specific feed on action=view, not necessarily as a visible link (though that would make sense). Removing the site-wide feed is a parallel request, and I agree with it as well: it should only be present in Special:RecentChanges and the main page (in addition to the page history feed, in the latter case).

(In reply to comment #2)

(In reply to comment #1)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed?action=history on the left (under
"Toolbox") nowadays only offers "Atom",

Indeed, it seems RSS support has been dropped. I believe it used to be
available as well in the past.

And it still is supported (you can manually make the url yourself), just not <link>'d since 1.16. Atom is a much better format than RSS, and pretty much all modern feed reader agents support both. Advertising both formats usually results in two choices for "live bookmark" type features, which is confusing to the user. This is configurable via $wgAdvertisedFeedTypes

As I see it, the request is to enable the page-specific feed on action=view,
not necessarily as a visible link (though that would make sense). Removing
the
site-wide feed is a parallel request, and I agree with it as well: it should
only be present in Special:RecentChanges and the main page (in addition to
the
page history feed, in the latter case).

I'm not sure how good an idea to remove the site-wide RC feed is (It feels like one should be able to set $wgOverrideSiteFeed to some special value in order to accomplish this [you can't currently]).

Some wikis might not want the history page feeds to be on view actions (for example Wikinews, since they probably want to push its RSS feed of latest articles), but they are probably few and far between (and I could be wrong about how wikinews would feel)