MediaWiki 1.25.0 (planned release 2015-05-27) will use the "enhanced recent changes" and "extended watchlist" options by default. The change doesn't affect Wikimedia wikis.

Explanation at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.25#Enhanced_recent_changes ; I'd particularly appreciate help in * updating docs around (with appropriate {{MW version}}), * adding a quick gif to show the (un)collapsing of one row on a representative Special:Watchlist view, * (ideally) re-writing the Meta-Wiki help page from scratch on mediawiki.org so that it can be translated.

Nemo

P.s.: I copy the current text from the page here as well.

MediaWiki now uses by default the extended watchlist and so called enhanced recent chances (preference "Group changes by page in recent changes and watchlist"), which received several improvements in MediaWiki 1.25.

This means that Special:RecentChanges and Special:Watchlist show all the changes to each page in a given day, sorted by page rather than chronologically. Changes to each page are then collapsed by default and a compact overview is shown, with links to collated diffs and counts of each user's actions. Full activity for an individual page can then be shown with a single click.

Users will no longer need to know in detail how a single change was chosen for display in order to figure out what else may have happened to the page that day, nor to scan a long list of non-contiguous lines on the screen in order to get a complete picture. The change is part of MediaWiki's evolution towards an interface which is more discoverable and less cluttered by default, while equally easy to quickly access in full, with the help of JavaScript. However, the (grouped) layout is an improvement for non-JavaScript users as well.