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Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Watchlists/Multiple watchlists

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Multiple watchlists

  • Problem: As an editor with thousands of pages on my Watchlist, I'd like to have multiple watchlists - each containing a subset of those pages - so that I can focus my attention on changes to specific groups of pages during an editing session.

One example use case from personal experience is that during the 2020 US Presidential Election I was interested in monitoring pages related to the election. These weren't pages I previously had on my watchlist, and I didn't want to drown out the pages I was otherwise interested in watching with the addition of ~250 pages, many of which would have very high activity and that I would want to un-watch in a few months. To solve this problem I made a 2nd account, where I watchlisted the group of pages I was interested in. I then signed into that account on a 2nd browser so that I didn't need to keep logging in and out. I'm sure there was a simpler way of doing this, but it's the method that seemed most obvious to me at the time.

In an ideal world, I would have been able to watchlist all the election pages but make them available in a secondary category from my 'main' watchlist.

  • Who would benefit: Experienced editors, particularly those with large watchlists or who are interested in tracking multiple categories of pages.
  • Proposed solution: There are a few different solutions proposed in previous incarnations of this wish. One that I found quite interesting was the ability to set 'tags' on pages, and then filter the watchlist based on combinations of those tags. A simpler approach might be to have articles exclusively in one watchlist 'bucket' or another. This would undoubtedly require both technical and UX exploration so I won't assume to propose a solution beyond these ideas.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: T3492
  • Proposer: Samwalton9 (talk) 00:19, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • I like the idea of being able to tag and filter your watchlist. I'm sure every long-time editor would have some sort of use with this - personally, there are a lot of pages I put on my watchlist when doing recent changes patrol, but sometimes I forget why I've watched them in the first place. Or they get mixed in with all the other pages and I forget I'm looking out for something specific with them. I would love to be able to create/use a tag so I can filter them out separately. - Whisperjanes (talk) 03:57, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
    • Love the idea of tagging reasons when adding to watchlist. Currently the only way sort pages you're interested in is to create a userspace page and sort them manually or use an external program like notepad. I would definitely use a tagging feature if its easier than either of those options. --// Lollipoplollipoplollipop :: talk 07:01, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I support this idea. I definitely edit in topic-themed chunks and would love to be able to maintain a tabbed (or something) set of lists that I could look at at a glance. Would also really love to be able to place all TALK pages on their own sub-list. Jessamyn (talk) 04:34, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I also like this proposal. Maybe just some "tags" and a relative "tag filter" would be a great idea--ValeJappo【〒】 08:51, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • Each time this is discussed and considered, I need to remind people about Special:RecentChangesLinked. If you really need something today, that's what you should employ for (especially) a (temporary) secondary watchlist. --Izno (talk) 18:51, 17 November 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Wow thanks for that page, I did not know it existed. You are right, this essentially cover this need if all the pages to follow are linked from a user sandbox for example. --Ita140188 (talk) 03:17, 14 December 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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