Taxon Wiki Syndication

Syndication of Various Taxonomic WIKI Pages

Most wiki systems support RSS output, which is basically an XML document that summarizes recent changes (to the wiki).

There are numerous RSS clients available for reading this information, and these generally fall under the category of "RSS aggregators". One open source, cross platform aggregator that seems to work fairly well is Amphetadesk. There are also tools that provide this functionality in the various mozilla products (see http://forumzilla.mozdev.org/), and there's probably at least one that will do the same for IE (for those that enjoy a potentially more adventurous web browsing experience).

The RSS feed from most wiki engines is fairly easy to find with a little sleuthing. The ones that are directly relevant to this page are:

TDWG.napier.ac.uk

http://www.soc.napier.ac.uk/tdwg/index.php?pagename=RecentChanges&format=rss

SEEK.ecoinformatics.org

http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/rss.rdf

seek.speciesanalyst.net

http://seek.speciesanalyst.net/ow.asp?a=rss (Note that this site should not show any more updates!)

However...

One immediately obvious problem is the poor quality of the RSS feeds generated by most wikis. Garbage such as changes to the SandBox is included, which is not so good, but could be easily eliminated if wiki builders could add support for a macro that would turn on or off RSS feed for any particular page.