I’ve set up little MediaWiki instances for small groups to do work in. One problem consistently encountered is a lack of awareness of updates and changes. The Recent Pages RSS is an ok step, but sometimes RSS isn’t an option. While there are RSS to Email services, the problem can also be solved directly in Mediawiki.
I used an extension I found on the Mediawiki, MailNotification. It provides a way to email all registered users of the wiki a summary page of all the changes made since the last time an email went out. Set up in cron, it’s an excellent way to make Mediawiki more suitable for small group collaboration.
The plugin doesn’t seem to be updated anymore, and it’s had a variety of issues for me everytime I update MediaWiki. I’ve been tinkering with the code, adding more details to the summary page and making sure it works with modern versions. I threw the code up on github last week, and provided a tagged release.
Feel free to let me know if you have any issues installing or using this plugin, and if you have any patches, feel free to send them my way.