How to Set Up Wikipedia Change Alerts?

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia and one of the most popular sources of information on the internet. In fact, Wikipedia is featured on the first two pages of Google for 15.4 million keywords.

Wikipedia content is largely crowdsourced by its network of authors and contributors. As a result, any page can be modified by anyone. As such, you may not always be aware that a Wikipedia page that you care about has been modified.

What if there was a way to get notified every time someone edited an important Wikipedia page? What if you could receive a change alert from Wikipedia whenever your own business' page or a competitor’s page was modified? What if you want to just monitor Wikipedia pages in general? As it turns out, you can with change detection tools, like Visualping.

Why Monitor Wikipedia Changes?

Below are some reasons you may wish to implement change monitoring for a Wikipedia page:

Editorial purposes: If you are an editor of a Wikipedia page, monitoring changes can help you ensure that the page is accurate and up-to-date.

Research: If you are a researcher or are otherwise interested in a specific topic, monitoring a Wikipedia page can help you stay up-to-date on the latest information about that topic.

Wikipedia defacement: A disgruntled former employee or angry customer may choose to leave a negative comment on your Wikipedia page as revenge. Likewise, a competitor may decide to update your company’s Wikipedia page with inaccurate information. If this were to happen, you need to be able to see the changes before a customer gets to it.

Here are some steps you can take to stay on top of important Wikipedia articles with change alerts:

Automate Change Alerts with Online Tools

Staying on top of your change alerts does not have to be a painful, manual process. Online alert tools, like Visualping, conveniently notify you when there is a change on any website that matters to your business.

Visualping is one of the world’s leading change detection tools, with over a million users. Visualping also features different ways to monitoring your pages, from visual to text to elements. For our case today with monitoring changes on your Wikipedia page, using Text Compare will be the best.

How to Track Your Wikipedia Page Using Visualping

• Step 1: Visit the Visualping home page and enter the URL of the Wikipedia page you want to monitor.

• Step 2: In Advanced Options, select Text Compare to track any text changes on the Wikipedia page.

• Step 3: Select the frequency of checks (e.g. weekly, daily, every 30 minutes, every hour, etc.).

• Step 4: Enter the email you would like to use to receive change notifications

• Step 5: Type in the name or label that would be associated with your page

• Step 6: Confirm your email address and complete the sign-up process.

You are now ready to start monitoring changes on your Wikipedia page. You will need to confirm your email to ensure Visualping deploys your change alerts to the correct inbox with your permission. Once that is completed, you will receive an email notification the next time someone modifies your Wikipedia page.

Create a Wikipedia Watch List

The alternative to automated platforms like Visualping is a manual tracking process. It is a bit more time consuming, but you have the option to set up alerts natively via Wikipedia.

To do this, you create a Wikipedia watch list. The watch list allows you to organize pages of interest in the form of a list. When a change is made to the page (new content, title changes, content deletions, etc.), you are notified via your watchlist.

Recent changes to your pages, such as page migration, also appear on your watch list. You will be able to see when the title of a page on your watch list has changed, as the old title will be moved to the new one.

Watchlists are private. So, no user (not even Wikipedia administrators) could see what is on your watch list.

Follow the steps below to create your Wikipedia watch list:

• Step 1: Create a Wikipedia account
• Step 2: Link the account to the email address you would like to use to receive alerts
• Step 3: Go to a page you would like to watch and click the star symbol between the View history tab and the search box to add or remove it from your watch list.
• Step 4: Add the page(s) you want to be notified about to your watch list.
• Step 5: Go to your Preferences and select “Email me when a page or file on my watchlist is changed”

Take Advantage of Email Notifications

If you want an automated means of tracking your Wikipedia page, Visualping is your best bet. It is very easy to set up. (Simply follow the steps outlined above). Visualping gives you customized options (frequency, format, and more) and allows you to track specific pages. Plus, it streamlines the alerts in your inbox.

It is important to note that Wikipedia change alerts are not provided for specific pages. Instead, you are notified every time there is a change on any page on your watch list. If you miss an email notifying you of a change or fail to visit the page, no additional notifications are sent for that change. You may still visit the page and view the edit-summaries to see any changes since your last visit.

With Visualping, you can track specific URLs, automate your change alerts and monitor page modifications with ease.

Get started for free.