Toby Bartels wrote:
No, I want a long Watchlist too, and I agree with Tarquin. I want to know if *any* of these pages is edited, however minorly, but I don't want to wait for them to load on the special page. For my money, adopting the format of other special pages, listing only the past 3 days or the past 30 edits by default, will be quite sufficient; no need for new formats like dumb lists.
I sometimes use my watchlist like a bookmark list to hold things that I might want to jump to later -- particularly things in the non-article namespaces which can't be gotten at through the search function.
A dumb/long list is nice because I can use my browser's text search on the titles listed in it; but the need for this would largely go away if I could search in Wikipedia: and User:.
(Sure, I could just use the 'bookmark' function of my browser, but that would be cheating, wouldn't it?)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)