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Make it easier for patrollers and other editors to prioritize tasks (Community Wishlist/FA1)

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Description

Background

With the scale and breadth of editing activity on Wikipedia (example), even advanced editors and patrollers can be flooded with information and feel overwhelmed on where to focus. As one contributor said: "If one has many articles on the Watchlist and wants to check all of them or as many as possible, this takes a lot of time. It also takes more effort to see the semantic changes done by human editors when diffs are very long and cluttered with such bot changes."

Contributors and editors need better tooling and capabilities to uphold the quality of their respective wikis, specifically to signal where and how to focus first. Use cases include editors who want to maintain quality of a specific topic (i.e., transit systems) that align to their personal interests, and editors who seek to ensure that topical and newsworthy edits (i.e., 2024 Olympics) or new pages align to the quality standards of their wiki.

Objectives

This Focus Area connects to the following Wikimedia Foundation objectives:

  • WE1: Both experienced and new contributors rally together online to build a trustworthy encyclopedia, with more ease and less frustration.
  • WE2: Communities are supported to effectively close knowledge gaps through tools and support systems that are easier to access, adapt, and improve, ensuring increased growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content.
Other details
  • Created: 08:54, 6 August 2024
  • Last updated: 01:34, 2 October 2025
Wishes in this focus area
Below is a list of wishes that have informed this focus area. More wishes may be added to this table over time. Voting for the focus area is not a guarantee that each wish will be explicitly delivered; rather, the wishes are suggestive of the problem at large. Once a focus area is adopted, the respective team will work alongside communities to prioritize and deliver on the most impactful solutions.
Voting

This focus area currently has 24 supporters. Voting for this focus area is open until it is completed.

Supporters of this area
Support Each of these wishlist items seem like they could be a good addition to their respective projects Johnson524 (talk) 04:19, 12 August 2024
Support Janhrach (talk) 13:37, 12 August 2024
Support The time-out issue is a must to fix, the highlighting one need some thought to come-up with a workable solution, rest are quick-wins. Keith D (talk) 19:20, 12 August 2024
Support this = more time that can be used for any other contributions; however I don't think it's (only) "prioritization" – it's also (mainly) better task organization including removals of repetitive tasks that don't need to be done or tags/notes for watchlisted items. Prototyperspective (talk) 15:59, 17 August 2024
Support Hakimi97 (talk) 01:10, 21 August 2024
Support Barkeep49 (talk) 16:35, 26 August 2024
Support They're all very nice features, especially to-do list, to keep a list of tasks on-wiki, as well as watchlist improvements. 2NumForIce (talk) 02:17, 27 August 2024
Support Shizhao (talk) 05:31, 29 August 2024
Support Labdajiwa (talk) 00:00, 1 September 2024
Support Evesiesta (talk) 05:33, 9 September 2024
Support Wostr (talk) 17:08, 13 September 2024
Support Swatjester (talk) 00:56, 26 September 2024
Support Tmv (talk) 15:08, 12 December 2024
Support Lotje (talk) 12:18, 11 March 2025 (UTC) Lotje (talk) 12:18, 11 March 2025
Support Agbeans247 (talk) 08:14, 15 April 2025
Support Junior5a (talk) 04:41, 26 April 2025
Support Abo Yemen (talk) 14:21, 25 May 2025
Support Aca (talk) 19:24, 20 June 2025
Support Goombiis (talk) 20:45, 24 July 2025
Support Ponor (talk) 19:49, 26 July 2025
Support Watchlists and RC pages could be more functional in various ways. StefenTower (talk) 17:56, 30 October 2025
Support Plutus (talk) 13:08, 7 October 2025
Support James3141592 (talk) 16:49, 19 October 2025
Support Pathfinbird (talk) 07:19, 13 November 2025