Non-technical users cannot understand the change-notification messages.
Observation
Users with a non-technical background have been subscribed to some pages on the wiki.
When a page is modified by a user, the subscribed users are sent an email with the following contents (when no change description is given):
Dear Wiki user, You have subscribed to a wiki page or wiki category on "(wikiname)" for change notification. The following page has been changed by (user): (URL) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ - bar foo + foo bar
The difference part is difficult for non-technical people to read, as they're not used to diff.
Task
Reading change-notification emails.
Users
Non-technical people with some email and web page background, limited or no UNIX experience.
Context
Several users (students in the faculty of humanities for the most part) have complained about how the change-notification emails are not useful in that they cannot understand what the actual changes are.
Discussion
I think a large part of this is due to non-technical users not being used to read diff output. Also, the line lengths in the email can be long if entire paragraphs are entered without a line break in the wiki, and thus line wrapping (in the MUA) can obfuscate the actual differences further.
Maybe the format used by wdiff could help here?
I don't have any suggestions how to fix the issue at this time. HTML email would make it possible to highlight the actual changes within the lines themselves, but it is otherwise yucky. 
In addition, some of the complaining users are using pine as their MUA, so HTML wouldn't help there at all.
- Sending HTML e-mails should be a trivial change in the code as moin already generates a colored diff and Python has MIME libs.