Watch pages

DokuWiki, like other wikis, including Wikipedia, allows you to be notified when anyone makes changes to pages that you want to know about. Anyone can do this, if they have an interest in changes to a page, provided they are logged in and have registered their e-mail address — otherwise DokuWiki wouldn't know where to send the notifications

When more than one person is curating or editing wiki pages, everyone really needs to keep up with what anyone else is doing on the pages they are helping to curate. Having automatic notifications is so much easier than having to tell people individually, or having to set up a messaging list specially.

In the vertical icon menu on the right, you can see an envelope icon called “Manage Subscriptions”. When you are looking at the page you want to watch, click on that envelope icon. You will see:

• “Current Subscriptions”: where you can stop watching any you have added;
• “Add Subscription” to watch a page
  • Under “Subscribe”, the default is to watch just the page you are on
  • Under “Receive”, choose whether you want an e-mail for every change, or just one e-mail per day.

Then you can sit back and relax! If anyone changes the page, you will being notified by e-mail.

Nearly everyone, nearly all of the time, uses common sense when they are editing pages. So when someone changes a page you are watching, and you get an e-mail — you'll likely be fine with the changes. However, occasionally people make mistakes. If you think someone has made a mistake, you can see who made the last change below the page, on the right; or if you're not sure, you can also go to “Old revisions” to see who made all recent changes. If it was a very obvious mistake, or a really, really terrible mistake, you can change it back or revert it: see editing saving reverting, and follow the instructions on the “Old revisions” page. But if it was something that different people may have reasonably different opinions about, there are two obvious things you can do:

• contact the person who made the change, and have a respectful conversation about how to make changes that seem fair enough to both of you
• raise a point in our Forum. Near the bottom of each topic page you will see a link to the Forum — click there and start a new topic about that topic page, if there isn't one already.

In the future, we are intending to have a section on each page where curators can give their personal opinions, where there are different opinions on a matter.