Date: Wed, 9 May 2012 12:42:21 -0700

From: Brandon Harris <bharris@wikimedia.org>

To: design@lists.wikimedia.org

Subject: Re: [Design] Visual watchlist

Message-ID: <F7A90CBF-85AA-4DEF-823C-A7FFB9F22417@wikimedia.org>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

Arun, you may be interested in the work being done on New Page Triage - specifically the "list" view, which is an attempt to add more useful meta data to the list of new pages.

So, before you do a lot of work on this (and you're welcome to do so), I think it may be useful to have a larger overview of what the "far reaching" plans are for watchlists and history views in general. I'll get to that in a bit, but I'll restrict my comments to your mockup.

First, I like the idea of doing a visual graph displaying size changes. However, Wikipedians as a whole prefer the numbers, which is a problem here. Clearly, we could do a lot of neat stuff like "show the numbers on hover" but that defeats a lot of the "at a glance" value that people get out of it. Mostly people want to see if things were *added* or *removed* (and this is currently handled by using red and green, which is bad, but it's not worth fighting over).

We can def. talk about this at the next Design Cabal meeting, if you like.

-b.