Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Watchlists/Setting for showing new notifications about new page links in the watchlist

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Setting for showing new notifications about new page links in the watchlist

  • Problem: Currently, when a page gets linked the creator of the page gets a notification. While normal patrolling happens via the watchlist this creates an additional separate system. It's okay when dealing with pages that get a handful of links but gets annoying when pages get a lot of links.
  • Who would benefit: People who create a lot of pages and prefer to use the watchlist over the notification system
  • Proposed solution: Have settings that allows to show the edits that create the links in the watchlist instead or in addition to the notification system.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

I am not sure I understand this fully. The watchlist is meant for watching pages, not one-off edits. Are you asking for the page which got linked to the page you created to be automatically added to your watchlist? I don't think a lot of people will appreciate that. A better solution seems to be per-page settings. What do you think? -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 18:50, 17 November 2017 (UTC) @ChristianKl: Hi, did you see my comment above? -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 00:42, 21 November 2017 (UTC) @NKohli (WMF): I believe the idea is that instead of receiving a notification when a page is linked, they would like to see an entry in their watchlist. Similar to the "X was added to category Y" entries for pages added to categories one is watching, or the Wikidata entries in the Wikipedia watchlist which appear everytime something changed in an item related to a page one is watching. There would be an entry "X was linked to Y".--Cirdan (talk) 09:12, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As far as I understand the watchlist is supposed to help people to keep track of edits that they might want to review. When dealing with pages that get a handful of incoming links getting notifications of "one-off" edits is fine. When dealing with pages that get hundreds of incoming links per year then the notification feature stops being the best task for the job and it would make more sense to it to the watchlist. ChristianKl (talk) 10:41, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
"As far as I understand the watchlist is supposed to help people to keep track of edits that they might want to review." Nope. It's about pages you want to keep track of, not individual edits. The edit you are talking about would appear in your watchlist if you were to watch page Y. Technically speaking, this proposal would be hard to implement and confusing to people who want this for some pages but not others. I still think the better solution is per-page setting which I have linked to above. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 00:30, 22 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
The wording of my request is agnostic about whether it's a global or a per-page setting. I agree that a per-page setting has advantages.
I'm not sure why you use the phrase "individual edits". When I'm getting notifications for 30 pages that now link to page X that feels to me like it's not an individual edit. There are cases where I do want to silence notifications because I don't care at all about the relevant information. On the other hand, there are cases where it's worth to review the linking to a page that's frequently linked and where the notification mechanism does seem to be ill-suited. ChristianKl (talk) 19:25, 22 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]