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).

Second, while I like the idea of popups with the diffs (as you'll see), we can't do a lot with javascript hiding mechanisms. It's an unfortunate thing that we're kind of stuck in the stone age with this, but that's the case.

And third, the trust mechanism/indicator: that's probably a no-go. We have weird legal requirements about what we can and can't do with that, and actually doing calculation may be problematic. The community has developed tools to do this automatically (ClueBot, for example), and that shields us (the WMF) from the "thin line between publisher and editor" that we can run into.

Now, about the future.

I feel (very strongly, actually) that any proposed changes to watchlist/history *must* take mobile views into account. This means that relying heavily on hover mechanisms is out of the picture - there are no hovers in touch devices.

In the (hopefully not so distant) future, we'll be introducing several new concepts whereby watchlist elements show up in a kind of "feed" for users, which allow them to click-to-open diffs in place. It is my ultimate goal to eliminate watchlists (as we know them) entirely, and move to a more useful and cohesive solution. If you search for "Flow" on mediawiki.org you can see some initial concept documentation; I'm working on building mockups but there's a lot on my plate for it.

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

-b.

On May 8, 2012, at 4:07 AM, Arun Ganesh wrote:

While looking at my watchlist last night, I was thinking - wow, this page hasn't changed much since the project began. I spent some hours doodling trying to see if I could make it much easier to browse through and visually identify suspicious edits.

I came up with this idea of visually showing representing the edits: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mw-ux-visual_watchlist.png

Its not much, but I think it shows the potential for change that this page has. Has there been any previous discussions on improving the watchlist?

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