Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Watchlists/Multiple watchlists

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Random proposal ►◄ Watchlists  The survey has concluded. Here are the results!

Multiple watchlists

  • Problem: As an editor with thousands of pages on my Watchlist, I'd like to have multiple watchlists - each containing a subset of those pages - so that I can focus my attention on changes to specific groups of pages during an editing session.

One example use case from personal experience is that during the 2020 US Presidential Election I was interested in monitoring pages related to the election. These weren't pages I previously had on my watchlist, and I didn't want to drown out the pages I was otherwise interested in watching with the addition of ~250 pages, many of which would have very high activity and that I would want to un-watch in a few months. To solve this problem I made a 2nd account, where I watchlisted the group of pages I was interested in. I then signed into that account on a 2nd browser so that I didn't need to keep logging in and out. I'm sure there was a simpler way of doing this, but it's the method that seemed most obvious to me at the time.

In an ideal world, I would have been able to watchlist all the election pages but make them available in a secondary category from my 'main' watchlist.

  • Who would benefit: Experienced editors, particularly those with large watchlists or who are interested in tracking multiple categories of pages.
  • Proposed solution: There are a few different solutions proposed in previous incarnations of this wish. One that I found quite interesting was the ability to set 'tags' on pages, and then filter the watchlist based on combinations of those tags. A simpler approach might be to have articles exclusively in one watchlist 'bucket' or another. This would undoubtedly require both technical and UX exploration so I won't assume to propose a solution beyond these ideas.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets: T3492
  • Proposer: Samwalton9 (talk) 00:19, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Discussion

  • I like the idea of being able to tag and filter your watchlist. I'm sure every long-time editor would have some sort of use with this - personally, there are a lot of pages I put on my watchlist when doing recent changes patrol, but sometimes I forget why I've watched them in the first place. Or they get mixed in with all the other pages and I forget I'm looking out for something specific with them. I would love to be able to create/use a tag so I can filter them out separately. - Whisperjanes (talk) 03:57, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • Love the idea of tagging reasons when adding to watchlist. Currently the only way sort pages you're interested in is to create a userspace page and sort them manually or use an external program like notepad. I would definitely use a tagging feature if its easier than either of those options. --// Lollipoplollipoplollipop :: talk 07:01, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I support this idea. I definitely edit in topic-themed chunks and would love to be able to maintain a tabbed (or something) set of lists that I could look at at a glance. Would also really love to be able to place all TALK pages on their own sub-list. Jessamyn (talk) 04:34, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I also like this proposal. Maybe just some "tags" and a relative "tag filter" would be a great idea--ValeJappo【〒】 08:51, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Each time this is discussed and considered, I need to remind people about Special:RecentChangesLinked. If you really need something today, that's what you should employ for (especially) a (temporary) secondary watchlist. --Izno (talk) 18:51, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Wow thanks for that page, I did not know it existed. You are right, this essentially cover this need if all the pages to follow are linked from a user sandbox for example. --Ita140188 (talk) 03:17, 14 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Absolutely. I'd really benefit from personal watchlists "Content I've worked on", "High-risk articles", "Patrolling", "Discussions" and an option to see them all aggregated. — Bilorv (talk) 20:09, 17 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • This is what i need. Rahmatdenas (talk) 09:51, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • This is very tempting - I could keep my AfD traffic to one side and otherwise split up usefully between my content and admin work. Big support Nosebagbear (talk) 15:32, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I will say this is a good idea, but the implementation need not be multiple watchlists, rather my suggestion will be having filters in watchlists, like what we have in recent changes and users can customize the filters to their liking (e.g. Wikipedia namespace, IP edits etc) I.e. bring recent changes into watchlist, like a recent change of watchlisted page etc. Camouflaged Mirage (talk) 16:09, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • @Samwalton9: This sounds like it might be outside the scope of the Community Tech team, which specifically says, "Tasks that are not in scope include: Large, long-term development projects like converting Commons to use structured meta-data or creating an entirely new watchlist interface." I'll leave it to the team members to make a more official evaluation though. Kaldari (talk) 21:51, 20 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
    • Ha, I'd missed that this was almost directly called out as an example of what not to do :) In my defense, Ilana told me to file this! Samwalton9 (talk) 22:38, 20 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
      • I actually think this might be doable this time. After our work on Watchlist Expiry, our team now consists of watchlist experts :) What I envision is using the "Saved filters" dropdown as the way to select your custom watchlists. So we don't need an entirely new UI. We just need a new table to store the relationship between the name of the watchlist and its items. In a sense it'd almost be a repeat of what we did for Watchlist Expiry, only this time we know where everything lives in the code. That's for a proper solution. At worse, we could make my crappy customWatchlists script something actually worthwhile. We'll have to discuss it more with the team before we go into the voting phase, but I don't think we need to archive this proposal just yet. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 00:23, 22 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • This watchlist proposal would work for my own situation. I would like to distinguish between articles I have created and articles by others that I watch for a variety of reasons, such as created by new editors from an editathon. Oronsay (talk) 18:33, 23 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • see also: Option to be e-mailed for every change to a page --Molgreen (talk) 16:43, 21 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Another see also: Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Watchlists#Add a "favorite this page" in the "watch this page" star. --Bageense (talk) 17:15, 24 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • Yes please. ToBeFree (talk) 23:33, 29 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • I made a similar suggestion to Community Wishlist Survey 2021/Watchlists/Large watchlist access above. May be could be combined into a single proposal. Keith D (talk) 18:03, 8 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
  • This might bethe easiest approach to haveing multiple watchlists. DGG (talk) 00:26, 12 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Voting

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