Would it not be interesting to slightly change the way the watch list is working ?
That's a very important tool on the en.wiki
1) to follow-up articles one is interested in
It can hardly be done with recent changes now; too many articles modifications everyday.
But in the watch list feature, what is really interesting - imho - is the watch of the most recent articles modified.
2) to a lesser extent to find back some articles one want to go back one day
but this can also be done with the search, or by adding links on personal pages
My watch list is hideously big. Each time I click on watch list, my next move is to click on the *stop loading* button after a small bunch of seconds. Just display the last 3/7 days of watched articles. 99% of the time, that's *all* what is needed. Why should one wait for the whole watch list to be downloaded ? Why should one impose extra useless burden to the server ?
How much of server time does the watch list query take anyway ?
How much of the client time does it take to load 400 kb of data, when only 50k are really needed ?
Why should not a persistent and repetitive human habit be automated ?
I'd like to see at the top of the watch list something like
- display the articles I follow which were modified in the past 3 days
- display the articles I follow which were modified in the past 14 days
- display all the articles I follow
With a default at 3 days for example.
It is not that this is *really* needed by humans, though it would be nice. But could it help performance ?
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