Help talk:Watchlist

Common watchlists

There is proposal at the strategy wiki for common watchlists, see also Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Common watchlists. Cenarium (talk) 17:30, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

New stylesheet?

Has someone just produced a new stylesheet for watchlists? In the last hour or two I am suddenly seeing my watchlist, & pages such as WP:WATCH, with a different format, with the menu items which normally sit at the top of the page moved to the left. David Biddulph (talk) 14:54, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Belay my last question. The problem seems to have gone away, so perhaps I had a corrupt file somewhere? David Biddulph (talk) 14:57, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

Grouping by days is very annoying

Is there any gadget or tool out there that would give a watchlist that actually shows all changes within a specified period instead of breaking it up by days within that period? It is very annoying and time consuming to see an article that happened to end in a vandalized state at the end of a day; the darn watchlist diff seems to indicate the article is still vandalized even though the next day all that was cleaned-up. Daily diffs must die! --mav (talk) 22:18, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

Watching pages function not working properly

So lately I've been editing via Huggle, doing a lot of reverts on dozens of articles. I changed my preferences so that I don't automatically watch pages I edit or create. That seems to work for my Huggle edits, but when I edit a page out of Huggle I still watch the pages I edit or create. This just happened when I manually fixed some vandalism, using Twinkle, in Charles Dickens and warned the vandalizer. My Huggle edits to that page did not cause me to watch it, while my Twinkle edits caused me to watch both that page and the IP I warned.

What might be happening here? Anyone know? Thanks, JohnnyB256 (talk) 21:03, 11 November 2009 (UTC)

I have never used Twinkle or Huggle but I will guess an answer :P Sounds like Twinkle doesn't respect the preferences (it can't check them). According to the documentation for Twinkle you can set it so it doesn't watch pages, by changing "true" to "false" for a couple of things and using "[ ]" instead of a list of stuff. You may need to manually install Twinkle to change the defaults. You could ask at the Twinkle page, or the Help desk for further help.--Commander Keane (talk) 08:22, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

That seems to be it. Thanks very much.--JohnnyB256 (talk) 15:20, 13 November 2009 (UTC)

Help Page Needs Updating

This section appears to be wrong.

Each line shows details of each edit: whether minor (m), whether made by a bot (b), the time, a link to the page, a link to the difference ("diff") made by the edit in question, a link to the page history ("hist"), the editor's user name or IP address, the increase (green) or decrease (red) in the number of bytes, e.g. (+76), (-590) or, if over 1,000, in bold: (+1,365), (-2,412), and the edit summary.

On my watchlist, the increase/decrease turns bold after 500 (or so I presume). Is my watchlist an abberation or was the point where it turns bold changed and the section not updated with it? Secondly, is it the number of bytes added or deleted that shows on the watchlist, or is it the number of characters (or are the two identical)? --Thejadefalcon^{Sing your song}_{The bird's seeds} 14:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

I have it as bold after 500; I've had a +501 bolded, but a +464 remained normal. For the most part, bytes and characters are the same, but I'm not sure; it counts every character you type, including markup (though when you type the four tildes to sign something, that gets expanded to the full code, and thus increases the size of the edit like this one). Aurora Illumina 23:31, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the help. I would have just altered it myself, but I wasn't sure. --Thejadefalcon^{Sing your song}_{The bird's seeds} 23:37, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

Are you sure? I've seen major edits (as in greater than Δ500 characters) be non-bold. -RadicalOne•^{Contact Me}•_{Chase My Tail} 02:12, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

500 bytes seems to be how it is for me. Gary King (talk) 02:51, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Do you use monobook? Maybe it varies? --Thejadefalcon^{Sing your song}_{The bird's seeds} 09:38, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

No, the bold appears to be hardcoded into the HTML as opposed to allowing the CSS to manipulate it, meaning that no matter what skin you use, it will always be bold if it's 500 or more bytes. Gary King (talk) 14:04, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Adding accounts to watchlist

Is there any way to add accounts to your watchlist, so they go on your watchlist when they edit? There are several people who vandalize over and over, despite warnings, and I would like a way to keep my eye on them. --The High Fin Sperm Whale (Talk • Contribs) 04:57, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

I think there is no technical solution for this yet. Looking in the Help desk archive I found this. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org is where to check for feature requests, but I haven't been able to open it in some weeks. Given the popularity of this question something should be added to the Help page. It would be a great feature too :-) --Commander Keane (talk) 05:40, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Generally, if I think the vandal is serious, I keep their contributions log open in a seperate tab until either a) they're blocked or b) they've been inactive for half an hour or so. It's the best method I've been able to figure out for now as it lets me rollback whatever they do in seconds, even if it's for a page I usually wouldn't touch with a twenty-foot barge pole. --Thejadefalcon^{Sing your song}_{The bird's seeds} 12:22, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Number of watchers

I had a hard time finding information regarding the "Number of watchers" feature, currently accessible from the top of every 'history' page. I eventually found a hint of the info at Wikipedia:Perennial proposals#Create a counter of people watching a page. I was wondering if there were any better locations to point curious people towards, eg a signpost article or VPR thread or bugzilla entry or similar, and if that could then be mentioned in this projectpage. Thanks.

Relatedly, there was a thread about watchlisting not equal to activelywatching, at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive_57#Ignore watchlisting by inactive users recently. -- Quiddity (talk) 20:46, 8 January 2010 (UTC)

Multiple languages on one watchlist?

I have pages from multiple languages that I regularly follow, but I can't seem to get them together on one watchlist. It wants to put them on separate lists for each language (very tedious for many languages). Even if I manually type in a foreign-language page on my English watchlist... as I save the page, the software automatically removes it from my English page, assuming, I think, that it's doing me a favor. Am I missing something obvious here? Tom Hulse (talk) 22:47, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

I didn't even know you were able to view pages from other languages in the English Wikipedia. How do you do this? Gary King (talk) 01:08, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps I'm not grasping the extent of practical separation between the different languages on Wikipedia. I wonder what the reason for separation might be, especially since they are all in the process of being interlinked back & forth between each other & WikiMedia Commons. To answer your question Gary I'll point to my favorite page, for the plant genus Brugmansia. Notice in lower left of that page under "languages" there are about a dozen links. I can go from the English main Brugmansia page to the one in Dutch, and from there to the Dutch page for one of the subordinate species, Brugmansia arborea, in Dutch, then jump to the Spanish site for Brugmansia arborea, then back to English, etc., etc. Each language has a different perspective on the species, and unique information to add, and the group as a whole is so much more powerful than one cell. They are all interlinked through a formal Wikipedia template, and I use them all. So my question is, what practical advantage is there in having separate watchlists, preferences, etc., that I can't even check by direct link from one to the other? Is this separation of different language wikis arbitrary, or is there a practical advantage that I don't see? Tom Hulse (talk) 01:29, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

The advantage is that each wiki is for a different audience; in this case, people who speak different languages. Each wiki should ideally be separate from one another in terms of content, meaning that an article in one language's wiki should not be dependent on content from another. But of course as you say, that's usually not the case. It definitely is not an arbitrary separation. I assume you speak both English and Dutch; many people only speak English and no other second language, for instance, so they only stick with the English Wikipedia. Gary King (talk) 02:50, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Separate in one sense, yes of course, but to what extent is appropriate? Wikipedia is international in many respects; I think it is far more integrated in practical use than you infer. For instance the last three editors that I have conversed with regarding their edits have been from (primarily) different languages than English, but were editing on the English version of Wikipedia. Also the language links I mentioned before are formally sanctioned under Wikipedia templates, and they criss-cross these many language wikis together, around, and back again. I am an English speaker who has a command of no other language, so I must muddle through with translators & help from various native speakers because I do have expertise in one small area of botany that can help in many languages. However I would wager that the majority of non English-first WP users are actually multi-lingual. Are we discouraging them from contributing in their other languages? If we said that Wikipedia was set up to conveniently edit for only one language (as would be appropriate for many Americans), wouldn't that seem a little similar to the Anglo-centric bias that we are so often warned about on WP?

When you say "Each wiki should ideally be separate from one another in terms of content, meaning that an article in one language's wiki should not be dependent on content from another", I think I have to respectfully disagree. :) The ideal is really the opposite. Encyclopedic-type facts, 99% of the time, are equally true in any language, and the ideal is for many more editors, throughout the world, to be able to lend their expertise & local flavor for a more complete, more interesting, and more perfect article. If they can't easily follow articles in more than one language, aren't we discouraging the worldwide mass of multilinguals from their full potential of contributions? Tom Hulse (talk) 05:46, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

This sounds like another feature yet to be implemented, see Bug 3525.--Commander Keane (talk) 05:53, 20 January 2010 (UTC)

Bug in hide bot edits

If you check the hide bot edits checkbox (and probably others), and you don't check Expand watchlist to show all changes in your watchlist, pages with previous conventional edits are not listed properly in your watchlist. From what I've found out, that is due to an old bug in the software (SQL) that nobody has fixed yet. I think that should be mentioned in this page as a caveat. --Jotamar (talk) 23:55, 29 January 2010 (UTC)
Has the bug been fixed yet? Keyboard mouse (talk) 20:18, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

No, it hasn't, I've just checked it. --Jotamar (talk) 15:07, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Then, we need someone to notice it and fix it. Keyboard mouse (talk) 00:04, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

I created Template:Bug. Svick (talk) 16:20, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

Now has it been fixed yet? Keyboard mouse (talk) 23:52, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Watching a section only?

It would be very useful to be able to watch only a specific section of a page, such as a specific discussion in a discussion page. Is this possible? This issue was also discussed back in 2008 on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help_talk:Watching_pages/Archive_4#Watching_a_section_only but at that time it didn't seem to be possible. David.hkmt (talk) 08:37, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Let me echo this idea. It would be particularly useful for sub-articles on pages such as WP:ANI and WP:RS/N JakeInJoisey (talk) 15:20, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

This is planned in the LiquidThreads, but who knows when they will be implemented. Svick (talk) 20:32, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you both for answering. Now I understand that it doesn't exist yet so there is no reason for me to spend more time "searching for the feature". David.hkmt (talk) 11:11, 26 April 2010 (UTC)

Displaying Changes Older Than 30 Days

Is there a way to make the watchlist display changes older than 30 days? Keyboard mouse (talk) 01:48, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

The edits in watchlist are taken from recent changes, that are kept only for 30 days, so the answer is no. Svick (talk) 02:31, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

I've noticed that the watchlist can display changes older than 30 days, but it doesn't because the watchlist is dependent on the List of Recent Changes. Keyboard mouse (talk) 20:16, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

Not displaying multiple edits to an article

Please excuse me if I have missed an option, but my watchlist only displays a single entry for a page, even if it has been edited several times that day. Is this a bug or intended behaviour? Thanks Alex Stacey (talk) 16:50, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

In your preferences, go to the “Watchlist” tab and check “Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent”. Svick (talk) 01:09, 9 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! Alex Stacey (talk) 15:17, 20 April 2010 (UTC)