Hi,

A discussion has started on-wiki about a global watchlist, and other related improvements to the watchlist feature.

A few people have started to organize the various bug reports about watchlists, but there is still much to do before we have a clear & prioritized vision of what the watchlist feature should become.

Improving a feature as used and central as the watchlist has the potential of drastically improving the users' experience, but is also likely to cause an outcry if proper research isn't done in advance, given that everyone has their own workflow.

Improving the watchlist feature isn't trivial, and it would help developers if users could come together and prepare clear specifications & prioritized features in advance.

I'd like to find a few people interested in working together to better define the possible improvements, organize bug reports, prioritize them into proper specifications, etc. in order to guide developers who'd be interested in implementing these changes.

Are you interested in working on proposing a better watchlist feature? (or spreading the word to your local community to see if other people are interested?)

If so, your input would be appreciated there: * Discussion: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Watchlist_wishlist * Draft product page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Watchlist_wishlist

More information, quoted from my comment on the talk page:

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I think it would really help if someone could consolidate the existing discussions, bugs, feature requests, etc. on a page. The main focus of the page would be on a watchlist that works across wikis, but the page could probably also benefit from prioritization of other related features and enhancements of the watchlist interface itself.

Apart from prioritization, this would probably also benefit from consolidating input from many users, to be sure that the use cases we're talking about are consistent with how people use their watchlists.

Basically, the questions we'd need to answer so that developers can work on global watchlists are those:

* How do users use their watchlist? * What would be the best way to implement a global watchlist? What would it look like? * What other changes would we need to make to the watchlist system and interface to make this work? * What other changes would we want to make to the watchlist system and interface while we're at it?

Some of these questions can be answered by going through existing bugs and discussions on bugzilla and wiki pages, and some will probably require talking to users to get their perspective.

(from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Talk:New_editor_engagement/Watchlists/... ) ====================================

-- Guillaume Paumier