It's a cluttered unoverseeable sea of blue (and the useless list of usernames continues for far below the screenshot)
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 and there's also some other advantages of it that make contributors use that instead of the ordinary Watchlist.
Please add an option to hide the list of recent editors next to article titles in the Global Watchlist which often are a huge sea of blue if a page was changed frequently and/or one hasn't checked one's Watchlist for some time.
Related issues breaking the Watchlist
English Wikipedia Watchlist content (with since last seen diff buttons) for comparison
Other related problems that so far mean to me the Global Watchlist is not usable and can't replace the Watchlist since I won't create a separate proposal for each of these and they are all related to this issue:
phab:T388336: Move buttons first like in the normal Watchlists so they don't have varying locations (so that one can easily and quickly open one diff after another).
phab:T298918: Enable the user to hide (or show) the timestamps on the left – just clutters the page for more info overload that isn't useful and makes it more difficult to put the buttons first.
phab:T298919: Currently it's just a sea of blue, the article titles should look different from the buttons (and userlinks if these are shown) so one can oversee things and quickly see which pages are shown – the easiest way for that would be to make article-titles bold (like they are in the normal Watchlists), ideally further adjustments could be made like converting the button links (history, diff, unwatch, mark page as read) to things that look like buttons instead of links and one could also add a setting for the styling of the buttons & links.
Further related major but nonbreaking Global Watchlist issues:
Current Global Watchlist settings
phab:T11790: When selecting "Only non-bot edits" in the settings, it also hides pages that were edited by a human but had a bot do the latest edit (e.g. people can just request CitationBot to copyedit a page to hide their vandalism) – this a very large problem also affecting the normal Wikipedia Watchlist and the bug has been open for over a decade. It should only hide the item if unseen changes include only bot edits (and otherwise if possible link to the diff of the human edits).
Integrate the filter options from the ordinary Watchlist, e.g. one can't hide edit made by oneself (to see just changes made by others) and structured data edits in the Commons Watchlist in the Global Watchlist (the ordinary Commons Watchlist however isn't broken because most items only get edited once so the button for the latest diff is usually sufficient)
A way to show all edit summaries and the + or - of added or removed text characters of included changes would also be useful (so that one can e.g. skip certain items based on these summaries or selectively check just a few of them). Moreover, several gadgets/scripts that work with the ordinary Watchlist like this for page tags are currently incompatible with the Global Watchlist (see also the issue about multiple Watchlist phab:T3492 and Wish:Watchlist highlighting/notes.
If these issues were combined one could call the proposal simply "A working Watchlist" but it's probably better to have this proposal focus on the recent editors list. I think one could use the Stylus Firefox addon to hack some workaround for styling issues #2 and #3 – one could even use that to hide the list of recent editors if that list was (it isn't) wrapped in a CSS class.
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
System change
Related projects
All projects
Affected users
Wikipedia contributors watching many pages (that is most of the editors who write or maintain most of WP contents)
.png)
.png)
