[WikiEN-l] Watchlist feature requests (was Re: Cruft)

[Steve Bennett]

On 03/05/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax at gmail.com> wrote:
> How many articles are on your watchlist? Do /you/ check every edit that
> appears on your watchlist?

Until there are better facilities for managing watchlists, I don't
think anyone can do that. I have close to 1000 articles on mine, and
others have 5 or 10 times as many. I tend to find that using "my
contributions" works better, checking any article for which my edit is
not the latest.

If anyone did feel like building some watchlist management tools, here
are some requests:
* Create a view which shows each article in your watchlist, sorted by
the most recent change (unlike the current view which can show each
article several times)
* Add checkboxes to the previously described view, allowing you to
rapidly unselect large numbers of pages from the watch list
* Add an option to remove all pages which you have not edited in the
last X days, or for which none of the last Y edits have been made for
you.
* Allow a way of bookmarking pages without actually "watching" them.
That is, to record the fact that a particular page was interesting,
without actually wanting to be informed of every change to that page.
*On a watchlist view, provide a link to compare the current version of
the page with the last version that you edited.

Even a way to bulk delete *all* items from my watchlist would be
better than nothing. So frequently I want to watch an article for a
couple of days, but that's it. I end up with hundreds of articles I
don't really have much interest in, but there's no way to prune them
except by the very tedious process of unwatching them one at a time.

Steve