On 9 May 2012 12:17, Arun Ganesh arun.planemad@gmail.com wrote:
I thought of studying my watchlist for a moment to understand why it was the way it was, and I noticed the following:
1. My watchlist begins half the page down, because of the watchlist options box, which btw I have never used or peered into. 2. The first link in each item is that of the current article. I have never clicked this because I might as well go through the changes by using (diff) 3. I have never clicked (hist) on the watchlist, I would first see the (diff) and only then browse the history
These days I most often click (hist), less often (diff), and practically never anything else.
(hist) is more useful for me on the English Wiktionary because I mostly add translation requests and several bots watch the recent changes feed which result in minor changes to most pages alter, which are of no interest to me. Also it seems that people monitoring the activity also often add other translations. By clicking (hist) I can see
1) If only bots have changed the page since me, in which case I don't need to see a diff.
2) When there were several human edits, which ones were in languages I am interested in.
3) The history page give me a way to get a diff of all changes since my last edit, rather than just the most recent chage.
Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)
4. 0 is colored grey making it disappear from the list. But that does not mean the article never changed, it could be +400 -400 words but the net is 0. The edit calculation can be highly misleading. I would rather want to know how many characters were added and how many deletions. Articles which have only additions are low on my priority list to patrol. 5. Before contacting any user or checking his (contribs), I would always see what his edit was. I open the (diff) and (contribs) in new tabs. This could have become integrated because its part of the same task. Same goes for talk and the user page links littered all over my watchlist 6. Knowing whether a user/ip has a talk page or not is important for me to identify a newbie or vandal 7. Reading each edit summary is really slow. Identifying where it begins on a line is tough of all the information that precedes it. 8. I can jump to the specific section directly by clicking the tiny → but not the section name itself. I have never used this link either as i would rather see the (diff) 9. The (diff) gives me the diff with the entire article and image loaded below. In most cases, all the info I need while patrolling is just in the diff. I only need the article if i want to check if tables/images are broken.
With that in mind I made this, which would solve most of my issues: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mw-ux-visual_watchlist.png Let me know if it would work for you as well? I hope to put some more thought on it and improving the idea. -- Arun Ganesh User:planemad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l