Help:Watchlist
From Governance Wiki
Your watchlist is a display for tracking changes, similar to the 'Recent Changes' display, but limited to showing changes only across your set of 'watched' pages. You can see the watchlist display by clicking "my watchlist" link in the top right, however this is only available to users who have registered and logged in.
Before you see anything interesting here, you must add some pages to your watchlist. Do this by navigating to a page which interests you, and clicking the 'watch' tab.
The watchlist feature is mainly useful on a very busy wiki where the 'recent changes' display becomes too "high traffic". On a typical low traffic wiki, you can normally see all of the editing activity across the whole wiki without feeling overwhelmed. On a more busy wiki you will find that many edits are taking place on pages which you personally find less interesting. To help track changes which are more interesting, start watching pages!
Typically you would watch pages related to your interest areas, and also pages where your care most about the content. If you make a significant edit to a page, you might chose to watch the page, to see if there are any follow-up edits for example. Note that there is a 'watch this page' tickbox provided on the editing screen for this purpose.
On the watchlist display, some page name appear in bold. This indicates whether or not you have visited the page to see the change. It's a bit like read/unread emails in an email inbox. The 'Recent Changes' display will also have some new bold highlighting, but for a different reason. Here bold is just indicating edits to pages on your watchlist.
See also Help:Tracking changes
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You can watch a page (if you are logged in) by clicking the "watch" link at the top of any article. This will add it to your watchlist, located at Special:Watchlist and accessible through the user bar at the very top of the page.
Your watchlist displays a list of changes to the pages you have watched, with the most recent edits at the top. It provides a Recent changes-type list that shows only the pages you are particularly interested in, making it easy for you to see the improvements that others have made so that you can continue to build on each other's work.
Watched pages will also appear in bold on recent changes.
How does it work?
The watchlist shows only the last edit to the watched page, by default. If there was more than one edit to the page since your last visit, you may need to view the page history to see them all.
If you watch a page, its associated talk page will be watched as well. You cannot choose to watch one but not the other.
By default, the watchlist shows edits from the last three days. You can choose other time periods from the links at the top of the Special:Watchlist page, but the page will reset to the default on your next visit.
There is no limit to how many pages you can watch, but if you watch more than 1000, the default cutoff for the watchlist will be 12 hours instead of three days. This reduces server load and allows the page to be displayed more quickly.
Removing pages
To remove pages from your watchlist, go to the page and click "unwatch".
To remove many pages at once, go to your watchlist and click the "show and edit complete list" link. Then check the pages you want to remove.
Email notifications
In your email preferences, you can choose to be emailed if an article on your watchlist is changed ("E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed") or choose a weekly digest ("E-mail me a Weekly Watchlist Digest"). This is a weekly email that will inform you of any pages on your watchlist that you haven't visited yet. It's a great reminder for those important pages that slip by on occasion, or if you have a large number of watchlisted pages.
See Email notification for details on how you can set your Special:Preferences so that you receive notifications in your email of changes to pages on your watchlist.
Other watchlist options in preferences
- Number of days to show in watchlist: changes the default time period shown
- Expand watchlist to show all applicable changes: will show all edits made to a page, not just the most recent
- Number of edits to show in expanded watchlist: limits the number of lines shown
The following options will hide certain edits from the watchlist, which may make it easier for you to monitor important activity on your wiki:
- Hide my edits from the watchlist
- Hide bot edits from the watchlist
- Hide minor edits from the watchlist
These options automatically check the "watch this page" box when you perform certain actions. You can always uncheck it manually for individual pages that you don't want to watch. Especially for small wikis, these options combined with email notification can make it easier to monitor activity on your site:
- Add pages I create to my watchlist
- Add pages I edit to my watchlist
- Add pages I move to my watchlist
- Add pages I delete to my watchlist
See also
- Help:Watching pages at Meta Wikimedia.
