My watchlist recently went over the 5,000 mark, but a handful of busy talkpages and noticeboards dominate the recent edits on it. I've set mine to ignore bot edits, and on the articles I'm interested in I don't bother to check the edits by users I recognise.

I think flagged revisions would help as there are several vandal magnets like [[Beaver]] that I would take off my watchlist if they were protected by flagged revisions. At present on the rare occasion when someone actually improves that article there are probably dozens of editors who check that edit.

But the change I'd like to see to watchlists is an option to ignore rolled back edits. If A has edited an article, b has then vandalised it and C has reverted to the version edited by A then I'd really only like to see A's edit on my watchlist.

werespielchequers

Message: 5 Date: Wed, 9 Dec 2009 16:30:17 -0800 (PST) From: Mike Pruden mikepruden@yahoo.com Subject: [WikiEN-l] Do we try to watch(list) the encyclopedia too        much? To: wikien-l@lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: 76300.90794.qm@web32603.mail.mud.yahoo.com Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Perhaps I'm the only one who finds this a little concerning in my part, but lately I've been feeling that too many users are trying to watch too much of Wikipedia at one time.

Let me elaborate a little. It isn't uncommon for the normally active user to have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages on their watchlist. Then, when somebody makes an edit that a certain user doesn't agree with, it gets changed or outright reverted. It's like, at the least, a form of a bunch of "Big Brothers" looking over an article and, at the worst, an outright form of page ownership.

I've been on the low end on watchlisting pages myself, but a couple of months ago I decided to "unload" my watchlist, removing most articles that I have extensively worked on since I came onboard -- going from about 50 pages watched to about fewer than 10 pages watched, only keeping those I'm monitoring in the short-term.

Personally, I found unloading my watchlist liberating, and I would hope that more would do the same. There's always that steady stream of vandal-fighters to stomp out any clear vandalism that pops up. It's hard to explain, but I think it's a good exercise in assuming good faith that others will make constructive edits in efforts to improve pages.

-MuZemike