User:Legoktm/wiki page or query page
Bot-run database reports post their results as a list or table on a wiki page. MediaWiki reports are special pages, specifically the QueryPage hierarchy. Each has pros and cons.
Wiki pages:
- have history, make diffing new entries simple
- show up in watchlists, have RSS/Atom feeds
- generate "what links here" links for pages currently listed in them
- are editable by regular editors
Query special pages:
- ephemeral, doesn't leave history behind
- more flexible pagination, not fixed to whatever number of entries the bot dumped on the page
- automatically get corresponding API modules, makes feeding pages into e.g. AWB/Pywikibot a breeze
- dynamic updating of pages that have been "fixed" (usually a strikethrough or smth)
Both types of page:
- Depend on developers or maintainers for changes, which can be a bottleneck (see this five-year-old request for an example of this bottleneck that was worked around with a report on a wiki page)
Ideas
[edit]- Allow watching query pages? Or just send echo notifications?
- Add a timestamp to query page results of when the page was first added to the report, allow ordering by that timestamp to show new entries first.
- Dump query pages to a wiki page? Just have a bot copy it over whenever the report is updated?