Well, lately my posts here are falling on deaf ears. But since this one is more technical maybe it will get some attention. :P

Bug 1710: Ability to watch all articles in a category http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1710

(By 'watch', I assume this means 'receive notification when members are added to/removed from the category', rather than 'put all members on my watchlist automatically')

Anyone who works with the category system would be well aware how much this is needed, so that the categories can be properly maintained. It doesn't seem like an official MediaWiki solution is going to show up any time soon. I had an idea for a solution: Make an article page, maybe for category X call it 'X watchlist' or 'X changes log', that you can put on your watchlist. Have a Bot somehow monitor the category (like, look at the category and compare the names of members to previous check) and report any differences on the article. Then by watching the article you will effectively get to find out any changes within the category.

The bot would only need to check the category like once a day, I would say. And possibly you would want to not allow this for very very large categories like [[:Category:Public domain]] or [[:Category:Linguistic maps]] or whatever. But for country-level cats and below it should be OK.

So... thoughts? Please fwd to wikitech-l if appropriate & if you're on that list.

I look forward to you techy-types nutting this one out for me. :) thanks,

Brianna [[user:pfctdayelise]]