Order Special:EditWatchlist by expiry (Community Wishlist/W454)

Description

Until recently Special:EditWatchlist was ordered:

first by expiry (ascending), for any watchlist item with an expiry set
second by page title

We removed sort-by-expiry, because the database queries underlying it are approximately 100 times slower. Slow database queries clog up the database connections and make the wikis slower for all logged-in users, so we try really hard to minimise them.

We've had feedback from community members that sort-by-expiry was important to some of their workflows. We can't just re-enable sort-by-expiry as it was because the queries were just too slow, but we might be able to figure out some alternative way of doing it instead (probably involving adding indices to the relevant DB tables).

I've added this wish to try and get a sense of how high-priority this is – if sort-by-expiry on Special:EditWatchlist is important to you, please support this wish!

Assigned focus area

Make it easier for patrollers and other editors to prioritize tasks

Type of wish

Feature request

Tags

Watchlist and recent changes

Affected users

Editors with many watchlisted pages

Other details

Created: 15:04, 30 October 2025
Last updated: 16:04, 30 October 2025
Author: CParle (WMF) (talk)

Voting

This wish currently has 11 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.

Supporters of this wish

Support , per discussion at [1] Mutt Lunker (talk) 18:23, 30 October 2025

Support May I assume that sorting a watchlist of 10 entries causes a much lower slowdown than sorting a watchlist of 10.000? If yes, would it be an option to define a "critical" value and not sort watch lists that are beyond that value? Like, if I watch 10 articles I get my old sorted list, but if I watch 10.000 I get it unsorted. Kind regards, Grueslayer (talk) 15:27, 30 October 2025

Support This was a radical change that upended my ability to see and work with "expiring soon" watches. I understand the performance issue, but at the very least, we need _a way_ to sort them the way we had it before, even if it's just a post-load "Sort" script we can click to run. StefenTower (talk) 16:49, 30 October 2025

Support I used the ordered edit watchlist to manage my work more than using the watchlist as a watchlist. If the database query is slow fine, just add a client side script (option) to order it. If we had multiple watchlists for different purposes that probably would work. But finding things I need to look at today and in the next few days is now horrendous. KylieTastic (talk) 23:43, 30 October 2025

Support I prefer the expiry-sorted list. It was helpful to identify articles that accidentally got perma-wishlisted due to using some tools (and thus remove them). Also used the sorted list to identify topics which I wanted to extend watchlisting. A few topics were purposefully perma-watchlisted and I would occasionally quit an entire category of a topic and unwatchlist those. Sorting the watchlist alphabetically has zero value for me. Grorp (talk) 15:01, 31 October 2025 (UTC) Grorp (talk) 15:01, 31 October 2025

Support I have relied for years on an expiry-sorted list and I never had any problem with a timeout. I get that some people have that problem, but many people don't. (I suspect that with some people its their phone or computer that is at fault for the problem and not the list.) Could we reach a compromise by letting people choose their own list, like how we let people choose their vector? Grey ghost (talk) 20:50, 1 November 2025

Support Qcne (talk) 21:33, 2 November 2025

Support Ciseleur (talk) 05:48, 4 November 2025

Support Pppery (talk) 05:27, 6 November 2025

Support Edit and searching became more difficult. Georg Hügler (talk) 05:42, 7 November 2025

Support IWL04 (talk) 06:09, 7 November 2025