[WikiEN-l] Watchlists (was: Re: Meaningful estimates of popularity?)

[Steve Bennett]

On 11/26/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Admins can see [[Special:Unwatchedpages]], which are those on no-one's
> watchlist. Discussion at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Special:Unwatchedpages

Hmm. Seems like it's based on some pretty flawed assumptions, like
that if a page is on a watch list, it's being watched. As opposed to a
list based on pageviews or something like that.

Personally, I think watchlists and "my contributions" are pretty
underpowered. The watchlist, in particular, would be much better
handled by dynamic queries like "the last 100 pages I've edited that
have been edited between 1 and 10 times since I last checked on them".
I'm keen to follow what happens to my edits, but "my contributions"
can only distinguish between zero or more than zero subsequent edits.
It also doesn't let me mark edits I've already "patrolled", so I end
up revisiting the same edits again and again until they finally scroll
off the bottom of the first page of the list...

Meanwhile my watchlist is totally useless as it's full of pages that I
lost interest in over a year ago. There's no way to trim the fat
either - I can either manually remove every single old page, or I can
clear the entire lot. But how do I clear just the pages I haven't
edited in more than six months?

Think Web 2.0, people!! :)

Steve