Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Watchlists/Sort watchlist by least observation

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Sort watchlist by least observation

  • Problem: I have a long watchlist. I would like to see those pages that are least observed by me as well as by others.
  • Who would benefit: Anybody who would like to observe pages that apparently nobody really cares for.
  • Proposed solution: Make possible to sort my watchlist of entries since not read by me by (1) number of watchers and/or (2) date of last change. Sort (1) should start with the smallest number, sort (2) should start with the oldest date (age). In other words: Sort by "least concerned and longest unchanged".
  • More comments: By that sorting I would get to those pages that nobody cared for for a long time. If this list would contain no pages that deserve observation either I can open them or get rid of them in my watchlist or mark them as "read" easily so these do not show up again.
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

  • I note that fetching the number of watchers is a somewhat expensive operation, particularly if you're trying to do it for all pages in the watchlist of someone with a very large watchlist. Presumably you'd really want to make that "active watchers", which is an even more expensive proposition. Anomie (talk) 17:30, 13 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Note also that only admins have access to the number of page-watchers, if it's less than 30 accounts, to prevent vandals from being able to easily identify targets. Therefor it wouldn't be possible to order them differently if less than 30. (Just in case you don't already know, you can see that information in the "Seiten­informationen/Page information" link in the "Werkzeuge/Tools" sidebar box. More info at w:en:Help:Page information.) With all that in mind, I don't think this proposal is practical/feasible. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:06, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • I concur with both above. This might be prohibitive in terms of processing time/load, and the ability for anyone to do it could readily make less watched pages easy targets. --Hammersoft (talk) 18:12, 4 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]
  • Not that I'll vote for this, but I think that, for the needs of the requester, the number of watchers does not need to be computed 'live'. A cached value which gets computed once in a long while would surely do. - Nabla (talk) 21:10, 5 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]