This proposal is a larger suggestion that is out of scope for the Community Tech team. Participants are welcome to vote on it, but please note that regardless of popularity, there is no guarantee this proposal will be implemented. Supporting the idea helps communicate its urgency to the broader movement.
View the history of a section, add a section to the watchlist
Problem: Sometimes a user (like me) only follows a certain/chapters in a certain article，Now if I want to monitor these chapters, I can only click "View History", and then click on all the new edits that may have edited these chapters to see if there are edits about these chapters, which is very troublesome. I wish there was a handy tool for monitoring chapters.
Proposed solution: Added "view history of certain/some chapters" and/or "monitor certain/some chapters" functionality
Who would benefit: Users who do not follow the entire article, but only certain sections of it
@GUT412454: If I'm understanding your proposal correctly (via machine translation, sorry), you're asking for a way to watch page sections. This is tracked in phab:T2738 (open since 2004!) and was also proposed in the 2015 and 2016 Wishlist Surveys. Note that watching sections of talk pages is now possible thanks to DiscussionTools' TopicSubscriptions feature, but it sounds like you're talking about articles. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 04:09, 24 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt this is feasible without way more resourcing than what the Wishlist has. Would require a 1) a new recentchanges table for sections, which would be larger than the normal RC table, which is already a performance nightmare; 2) probably some kind of section title normalization, like the recent linktarget table; 3) identifying which sections have been edited, which means messing with the parser. Maybe worth revisiting after T307328 gets fixed. --Tgr (talk) 04:48, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@Tgr: That's probably true for the section watchlist, but what about viewing history of a section? I feel like these two things might be better off as separate wishes. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 06:51, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
@SWilson (WMF) they are both infeasible though. The revision table is so large that the last structural change to it took two years to run, and here you'd have to process every edit on top of that to fill up the revision-to-section mapping table. That's even more daunting than doing something similar to recentchanges. Tgr (talk) 01:21, 1 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Putting feasibility aside for a moment, this would be especially useful for forums such as ANI and VPT which host multiple simultaneous discussions, of which only a few will interest the typical editor. Certes (talk) 00:08, 2 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
Support being able to follow one VPT or ANI section without being alerted to every comment on every discussion there. Certes (talk) 21:49, 10 February 2023 (UTC)