Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Watchlists/Automatically add subpages in the watchlist

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Automatically add subpages in the watchlist

  • Problem: On several wiki, the archives of community discussions are structured as "Commons:Village pump/ArchiveYYYY/MM" (this is an example with Commons but this is the same idea on other projects and languages). Not talking about archives, some community discussions are stuctured this way: "Wiktionnaire:Questions_techniques/MM_YYYY" which means there is a new page to watch each month. This leads to the creation of such list.
  • Who would benefit: every contributor who watch community discussion pages that use subpages. It will allow to see a change in an archived discussion.
  • Proposed solution: Mediawiki should offer a new button next to the "Watch this page" button. This new button would be "Watch this page and all subpages". Clicking on such button, if a contributor chooses to watch Wiki:XXX, then all subpages are automatically added to the watchlist Wiki:XXXX/aaa, Wiki:XXXX/bbb, Wiki:XXXX/cccc, ... When one subpage is created, it is automatically added to the watchlist of user who watch this main page.
  • More comments: I think one should allow users to be able to remove subpages individually from their watchlists. For exemple, if one watches Wiki:XXXX, then Wiki:XXXX/aaa and Wiki:XXXX/bbbb are automatically added to the watchlist. Yet, one should be able to remove manually Wiki:XXXX/aaa.
It appears that Extension:WatchSubpages has been developed for this purpose but it is not deployed on any wiki because it needs to pass several reviews. The developer, Prod started the review process but did not finish it. So I think an official support by the MediaWiki developers is a way to see this extension alive.

Discussion

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