Wikivoyage talk:Watchlist help

Two-step confirm process for adding a page to your Watchlist

Archived from the Pub:

I don't know where else to comment on this, but the two-step process for adding a page to my Watchlist that includes a confirm step is a real PITA in my opinion. I've never seen this on any other wiki. (WT-en) BlankVerse 05:25, 16 January 2007 (EST)

True, but it's difficult to avoid technically. This site uses a an extension called Cache404 which basically makes everything a flat page until you edit it. As you can imagine this really cuts down on bandwidth required, but has the disadvantage of making it impossible to set the watch/unwatch tab correctly when the page is rendered.

We've talked about a couple of solutions, but the one we're using for now is the two-step process. I suppose another way to do it would be to build a little javascript per user with containing a function that takes a page name as an argument and returns true if the page is on the watchlist or false if not.

That would be quite a project though, so for now this is how it is. -- (WT-en) Mark 09:41, 16 January 2007 (EST)

Watchlist problems

The automated mechanism by which pages get "added to watchlist" seems haphazard. Although I have my preferences set to automatically add pages I create to my watchlist, only about 9 out of 10 new pages actually get on my watchlist. I've had to go back an add a lot of pages for which I am the only editor, and I just noticed this happen with the most recent new page I made, Udmurtia. Anyone know what's going on? --(WT-en) Peterfitzgerald ^Talk 13:13, 26 May 2007 (EDT)

I haven't noticed that, but while we're on the subject, can we revive the 2 step confirm process conversation too? What's stopping us from using the single watch/unwatch button like Wikipedia does? – (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk 14:54, 26 May 2007 (EDT)

Wikivoyage pages are actually written to the server's hard disk the first time they're read; everyone gets the same HTML the server. This makes for a very fast response time (not lately, but usually). We do some JavaScript tricks to put your name, talk page, admin buttons, etc. onto the page. It's a pretty crafty system.

One thing we don't do is twiddle the "watch/unwatch" button based on whether the current page is already in your watchlist. I think the two-step process is worth it, compared to the speed savings and complexity of working out another solution. --(WT-en) Evan 12:54, 27 May 2007 (EDT)

Okie dokie – (WT-en) cacahuate ^talk 00:26, 28 May 2007 (EDT)

Aha! I finally figured out why the watchlist problem described above occurs. If you are logged out and editing a page, it is not possible to have the "watch this page" box checked. So if you log in and then save the page, the box will remain unchecked, regardless of whether you were watching the page in question, and you will by default automatically "unwatch" the page. I'd file a bug report, but it seems kind of pointless to do so, as there are about 80 open bug reports, none of which seem to be getting any attention. And now if I could stay logged in longer than 30 minutes, this wouldn't be a big problem—but I've given up all hope of that ever happening. --(WT-en) Peter ^Talk 03:35, 27 September 2007 (EDT)

Out of date? Useful?

This project page seems out of date. Even if it is updated, is it useful or could it be deleted? Nurg (talk) 05:18, 4 May 2013 (UTC)

It's definitely out of date. Maybe we could cover this basic information elsewhere? Maybe at Wikivoyage:User preferences help#Watchlist, since this mainly seems to be about that aspect. Or a section at Wikivoyage:Recent changes help? --Peter ^Talk 15:07, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

What about just doing a soft redirect to mw:Help:Watchlist? We shouldn't need to document Mediawiki functionality locally since that info will just be an outdated duplicate of the Mediawiki documentation. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:31, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Unified Watchlists

Swept in from the pub

I realise that this is way beyond our scope, but I believe it's something we should be campaigning for as part of our efforts to involve more people on Wikivoyage. Whilst discussing the Tourist Office's link on Wikipedia (here) this was raised as an issue that would prevent editors from working on a number of projects at once. Such an issue clearly has been floating around Wikimedia projects for a while (Exhibit A, your honour), but is seemingly yet to be implemented. As small wiki with much to gain (from users at our biggest brother in particular) is there anything we can do to try and nudge the entire Wikimedia community in this direction? --Nick (talk) 20:20, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I have an account on all publicly editable WMF wikis (over 700+)! What I generally do is check the primary 4 that I am involved in (English Wikipedia, Meta, Wikidata, and here) every few hours and have email on user talkpage message turned on for all the other projects. I also have a link to my home project on all my userpages. It's not an ideal system but it works enough for me. --Rschen7754 20:41, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Watchlist

Swept in from the pub

Is it possible to see a list of pages on my watchlist? Wikipedia has this functionality, I don't see it here. Ar2332 (talk) 21:51, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Yes, Special:EditWatchlist will tell if you've been watching anything naughty. Oh dear! K7L (talk) 01:31, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

Sort of hard to find a link to this - I eventually found the link in Preferences->Watchlist. I think it should be linked to from the regular watchlist page... Ar2332 (talk) 21:43, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

You'd need an admin to change that. MediaWiki:Watchlist-details currently says "$1 pages on your watchlist, not counting talk pages." and I presume you want it to say "$1 pages on your [[Special:EditWatchlist|watchlist]], not counting talk pages."

Then again, now that you've found Special:EditWatchlist, you could bookmark it in your local web browser for next time? K7L (talk) 00:09, 12 July 2017 (UTC)

View new changes on Watchlist

Swept in from the pub

The message "View new changes since ..." does not appear anymore on the Watchlist, since yesterday. It still appears on Wikipedia. I tried it in several browsers. --FredTC (talk) 09:59, 7 May 2021 (UTC)

It shows for me. Do you have some security extension across browsers? I haven't restarted my browser for several days, so if there is some update to the javascript I might still be running the old version. –LPfi (talk) 11:48, 7 May 2021 (UTC)