A button in the Watchlist to see a diff of all unseen changes next to each article (Community Wishlist/W424)

Description

I think the Wikipedia Watchlist is broken and not usable, mainly because it's missing a button to see a diff of all unseen changes.

The Global Watchlist has such a button when "Group results by page" is enabled in the settings. However, 1. that Watchlist is not known and not used by most active editors 2. this should also be in the main/normal Watchlist regardless of whether it's available there and 3. that Global Watchlist can't really be used in practice with that setting due to the various issues described in related wish Hide the list of recent editors next to article titles in the Global Watchlist.

Currently, if I'd have to use the Watchlist without such a feature:

I would go through the Watchlist and for most items / all articles that I want to review changes of would click on the hist button to open that page's revision history in a tab,
then after opening a bunch of tabs that way I would go through each tab to manually select the oldest seen revision based on the green or grey dot per revision that I have to spot which needs close examination and a precise click on the small button to select the revision,
then I would click the "Compare selected revisions" button at the top which may need scrolling back up,
then I go to the next tab until all the tabs I've opened are all displaying the proper diff and ready to get checked

That's a lot of time and taking a lot of exhausting focus if you open say 200 diffs this way without even having reviewed anything yet (and this is a very normal number for checking the Watchlist items of a few days).

Please add a native ability to open a diff of all unseen changes for a page with one click. Countless hours of volunteer time would be saved by this who can then use that extra time to write more articles, check more changes, real life activities, or building new wiki things.

I have been using a script to get such a button and really don't know how and why anybody who is an active editor with over 50 watched articles can consistently use the Watchlist of a Wikipedia where there's lots of changes like mainly English Wikipedia without such a button. Maybe some users who never thought about needing such a button could explain why apparently nearly all users don't use any scripts for this and aren't calling for this. For me it's a complete mystery – like that is the most obvious and easiest way to make Wikipedian's daily activities a lot more efficient and save possibly the greatest amount of time with just one change – so maybe I'm missing something.

On other projects and possibly the 50% of smallest Wikipedias, it may be common that there's only one change per item so on Wikimedia Commons I don't really need such a button to review changes of file pages and for meta pages like Village Pump the revision history may be the better place to look at first since one can see section headers in the edit summaries (this may also apply to a minority of meta pages on Wikipedia Watchlists). On English Wikipedia, it's often the case that an article gets 20 edits within just 10 days which may be your average time until you check an article's diffs. I imagine many editors give up on checking the Wikipedia Watchlist because of how much it's like an overflowing inbox with it feeling impossible to consistently go through it in the way described earlier and taking too much time and effort. If there's this button, that doesn't mean people need to use it – one can still always or on a case-by-case basis go to the revision history. Moreover, one could also add things like a list of the edit summaries of the included diffs or the added/modified section titles at the top for multi-edit diffs so that one can see if e.g. somebody tried to insert content which was removed, resulting in an empty diff (one can also do this after seeing the multi-edit diff; at the top it would show the number of revisions). By the way, a further added benefit of this is that problematic edits become more visible as many users may only check/see the latest edit (/edit summary) with their current Watchlist use but the user may have made two edits right after another so as to hide the prior edit or another user or especially a bot may have edited the page shortly afterwards.

As the feature described here is already possible with a script, building this into a native robust feature that works for all Watchlist items (the script often doesn't) and is available to all editors by default may not be as difficult as it may sound to some.

Assigned focus area

Make it easier for patrollers and other editors to prioritize tasks

Type of wish

Feature request