Wikis publish a list of updates (atom feed), which allows you to see the latest changes in a reader (for example, the Thunderbird email client). An atom link is too discreet, displayed on some pages at the bottom left.
Atom or RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
Here is a selection of programs that can retrieve these feeds (on wikipedia) at Comparison of feed aggregators.
This avoids having to browse through the 6 special pages - an array, with a selection of the most useful ones, is at Special pages.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a family of data formats used to syndicate Web content.