How does WikiAlerts monitor Wikipedia changes?

WikiAlerts™ monitors Wikipedia by subscribing to Wikipedia’s live edit feed for every page on a user’s watch list, then emailing an instant, diff-level alert the moment any of those pages is edited.

How the monitoring works, step by step

1. Subscribe to the live edit feed, WikiAlerts taps Wikipedia’s real-time stream of edits rather than polling pages on a schedule, so it sees changes as they happen.
2. Match against the watch list, each incoming edit is checked against the pages a user is watching: their company page, executive biographies, brand pages, or competitor pages.
3. Send an instant email with a diff, when a watched page changes, an email goes out showing exactly what was added, removed, or changed, and by which editor account.
4. One-click revert, if the change is clear vandalism, a revert option rolls the edit back through the same “undo” mechanism a Wikipedia editor would use.

Why it works, and what makes it hard

The approach is possible because Wikipedia exposes its recent-changes stream as a public feed (available as RSS/Atom), and because the wiki software lets any editor undo a single edit directly from a page’s history or diff. The engineering work sits in operating that at scale: ingesting a high-volume edit stream, rendering readable diffs, delivering email reliably, and filtering out trivial changes, like reference reformatting, so users are not flooded with low-value notifications.