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Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Watchlists/Ability to remove/mute page when ''viewing'' watchlist without permanently removing from watchlist

< Community Wishlist Survey 2019‎ | Watchlists

Ability to remove/mute page when viewing watchlist without permanently removing from watchlist

  • Problem: Sometimes a particular page (or related pages) will have a high number of edits and overwhelm the revisions shown on the watchlist page. In some cases, it's because I've edited an article that is related to a current event. In some cases, it's a talk page that is getting a lot of edits to a proposed policy, which I can just view the page in a new tab and read the entire discussion (no need to view every edit). This is really annoying. Currently, I work around this issue by opening the page in a new tab, clicking the star to remove the page from my watchlist and then when I'm done browsing my watchlist, click the star to re-add the page. I haven't been very active on Wikipedia for the past 12-18 months, but regularly log in to view my watchlist (which has 1776 pages). I have the maximum 500 edits and 30 days selected, but at the time of writing this, it only goes back 72 hours (almost to the minute). w:Lion Air Flight 610 (a plane that crashed a week ago with 189 on board) and its talk page appear 101 times, a talk page with a lengthy proposal discussion appears 41 times, and a couple pages that were subject to vandalism edits & revert appear 17 & 18 times...together that's over 1/3 of my watchlist page consisting of edits to 5 pages! If a page has been edited numerous times, I can just go to the edit history and compare revisions. It would be nice if there was a way to remove pages from appearing in watchlist edits (the page you get by clicking "watchlist" in the upper right and shows edits to watchlist pages) without permanently removing them from the watchlist (the list of articles that are checked for recent edits). I'll refer to this as "muting" a page in the watchlist.
  • Who would benefit: Editors with watchlists that contain a lot of guideline/policy talk pages that can be subject to a lot of editing over a short period (usually related to a proposal) or contain pages related to topics that are in the news. It would also benefit editors with large watchlists who don't log in every day and would like to see more edits appear on the watchlist page.
  • Proposed solution: Have an unobtrusive button—like how "(diff|hist)" links appear on the watchlist or the "thank" button appears on the diff page—that would allow the page to be muted. After that button is clicked, you would be presented with options on how long you'd like to mute the page: just while currently browsing the watchlist (labeled "just once"), while logged in, 12 hours, 24 hours, 48 hours, a week (would be useful length for pages in the news...you'd know what they are and can visit them without going through the watchlist). This would work like the give thanks button on the diff page, where "(thank)" expands to "Publicly send thanks? Thank Cancel". In this case "(mute)" would be added to each line would expand to "Mute [just once] [while logged in] [12h] [24h] [1 week]" (I used brackets to indicate separate buttons). After selecting your choice, it the entire line for the edit entry would be replaced with "You have muted [Page name] for [duration]. Change?", which gives editors an easy way to change the duration if they accidentally clicked the wrong duration. A specific duration could be set in preferences to be applied every time, possibly with a button or prompt after clicking to allow you to change the length once.
Here's how that would look:
  • (diff | hist) . . Lion Air Flight 610; 23:35 . . (-324) . . 125.165.174.88 (talk) (→Passengers and crew) (Tag: references removed)(mute)
  • (diff | hist) . . Lion Air Flight 610; 23:35 . . (-324) . . 125.165.174.88 (talk) (→Passengers and crew) (Tag: references removed) (Mute [just once] [while logged in] [12h] [24h] [1 week])
After selecting the duration, the line entry where you have selected the mute will be replaced with the following line and other edits to that same page will disappear from the watchlist page you are viewing:
  • You have muted the page Lion Air Flight 610 for one week. Change?
If you really wanted to be fancy, you could have "custom" at the end of the options that would create a popup (not as in a separate window in you browser, but just graphically overlaid on the page) with a dropdown for numbers or a box to enter digits and a dropdown with "hours", "days", "weeks", and "months". A reasonable maximum (2 months?) should be added to prevent unintended muting for long periods. Also, a reminder should be added to the top of the watchlist page when you subsequently visit it: "X pages in your watchlist are currently muted. View list" Clicking on it would reveal a list of pages and durations with a button "end" to end the muting.
  • More comments: I think I've come across a discussion about this before (not this exact proposal, but temporarily removing pages from a watchlist), probably on the Wikipedia village pump.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: AHeneen (talk) 07:54, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Note: There must be somewhere list of my muted pages, where I can manually unmute them. Maybe as new section on Special:EditWatchlist. JAn Dudík (talk) 13:28, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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