Problem: Sometimes it is easy to not notice that an article or page on your watchlist has been tagged for some sort of deletion, particularly if there has been an edit after the one tagging for deletion so it does not show on the watchlist.
Who would benefit: Any editor (but mostly experienced editors) keen to keep track of articles that they care about being proposed for deletion so that they can participate in deletion discussions and make sure that deletion tags are not being used spuriously. This may also benefit administrators as it should reduce requests for undeletion made by people who didn't realise that an article/page was up for deletion until it was actually deleted (although I don't know how often that actually happens).
Proposed solution: Articles/pages that have any sort of deletion tag on them should be shown with a clear indication in the Watchlist. This might be an icon or a coloured highlight. When an article/page is proposed for deletion of a type that has a discussion (AfD etc) then the discussion page should also be automatically added to the Watchlists of all users who have the article/page on their Watchlist. It is reasonable to assume that anybody who cares enough about something to put it on their Watchlist would want this but, if some people disagree, then maybe automatically adding the discussion to the Watchlist could be an option per-user.
@DanielRigal: I see English Wikipedia is your home wiki, so you may be interested in w:User:Anomie/linkclassifier. This script will highlight links pink if the target page is up for deletion, among other features. Unfortunately we can't simply deploy this gadget to all wikis, because deletion processes differ by community (at least the category names do). We could however rework the gadget to be configurable so that other wikis can install it if they wish. Would you like to reword your proposal to be that, or does this user script work for you? I do not believe a proper MediaWiki solution is easily achievable given there is no uniform deletion process in MediaWiki. MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 00:46, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Category names could be read from the Wikidata item for the category. --Izno (talk) 05:42, 18 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
True, but different wikis have entirely different deletion processes that use categories differently. For example, most wikis are not going to have an equivalent of Category:Expired proposed deletions of unsourced BLPs, but they may have some other equally obscure and complicated system. I think the only way this would work is if each wiki configured the gadget with their local list of deletion categories. Kaldari (talk) 21:20, 20 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Technical implementation might be an issue - how does the watchlist "know" that a page is up for deletion? I'd imagine we'd get a system message (say MediaWiki:Deletion_templates) that can be edited to get a list of templates and if one of these templates is transcluded in a page the watchlist highlights it (presumably if a user preference is set) Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 16:16, 19 November 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Strong support all too often I come back to a stub after researching it and drafting an offsite solution only to find the page deleted. I’d also suggest slowing the deletion process as a secondary method. Lostinlodos (talk) 00:00, 12 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Support For me, the enwiki userscript highlights a bunch of stuff that I don't want higlighted and are not up for deletion. I would hope that this one just highlights about to be deleted pages. Ghinga7 (talk) 16:54, 18 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Support This has been required for a long time Sarah777 (talk) 19:40, 18 December 2020 (UTC)Reply[reply]
Support Imetsia (talk) 18:58, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
Strong support all too often I come back to a stub after researching it and drafting an offsite solution only to find the page deleted. I’d also suggest slowing the deletion process as a secondary method. Lostinlodos (talk) 00:00, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
