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Phantom pages on my watchlist

Every so often I find items on my watchlist that I did not put there. Not only did I not put them there, but apparently neither has anyone else -- the links lead to empty articles. How can I put a stop to this? How can someone else add items to MY watchlist?! Misterdoe (talk) 18:44, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Red or Green, + or -

I think someone should talk about when you resecive a message that some one has edited a page and it has a + or - and then numebers in etheir red or green. Rdrg93 (talk) 19:16, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

It's the number of characters added/deleted. See Wikipedia:Added or removed characters. Marc Kupper (talk) (contribs) 22:01, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I know that but I just think someone should talk about it on the article. Rdrg93 (talk) 15:49, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

I would like to "second" this request - it was trying to figure out what those things are that actually brought me here, and I'm delighted to have found the answer, but I think I was lucky - thanks, Rdrg93, for asking first. —Martha (talk) 06:16, 6 April 2008 (UTC)

What does it mean if the number is in bold? skeptical scientist (talk) 21:23, 24 July 2008 (UTC)

SkeptSci: Maybe your answer is in the section below. As for myself, I'd like to know whether this count is always true; When I checked my watchlist the first time, two changes to each their own page had seemingly added in the vicinity of 30 000 characters... Smolk (talk) 02:10, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

"Technically" it's the number of bytes added or removed. Tommfuller (talk) 10:48, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I'd like to "third" the request that an article explanation is given for the "subtracted vs added" numbers in red and green. I've been puzzling over those right up to this moment. Haploidavey (talk) 16:02, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

How to enable "updated (since my last visit)"

A wiki that we use at work bolds articles that have changed since my last visit in my watchlist, and tags edits that have been made since my last visit in the page history. I remarked to someone that it'd be nice it Wikipedia did this, and she told me that Wikipedia does do this. When I searched for the function, I found the appropriate section on this page, which tells me that Wikipedia has the feature... but I don't see it in action on my watchlist, nor do I see anything in my preferences that would seem to enable it. What do I need to do to enable this feature? Erik Harris (talk) 12:39, 5 April 2008 (UTC)

You can't, it's part of the email notification extension, which is not currently installed on Wikipedia. -- Gordon Ecker (talk) 05:48, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Hide bot edits...?

Why do User:ClueBot's edits show on my watchlist even though I have "hide bot edits" checked? I unchecked and rechecked it, and I still have ClueBot's edits. Spencer^T♦C 02:09, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

I moved the question to User talk:ClueBot Commons#Not flagged as a robot? where it got answered. Marc Kupper (talk) (contribs) 10:13, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok thanks. But now I'm seeing edits from User:SpillingBot. This is odd. Spencer^T♦C 21:50, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

Delete log

I noticed awhile ago that all the worst obscenities, blp violations and other crud always ended up on my watchlist because when somebody would remove say User:SqueakBox to User;SqueakBox is a plonker, the latter would remain on my watchlist until or unless removed manually. I can only imagine what many people's watchlists look like, I always cleaned mine out regularly but now with the deletion log in place we get warned of this kind of crap and so it can be cleaned out immediately. This is the kind of development that really makes a difference. Thanks, SqueakBox 18:55, 19 April 2008 (UTC)

Updated from meta?

Is this page really regularly updated from the master page at meta, like it says at the top? If not, perhaps we could remove the notice?--Kotniski (talk) 12:41, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Terminology confusion

As discussed at WP:VPPR#"Watchlist" terminology clarification, the word "watchlist" is used for both the list of pages that are being watched, and for what I call the "watchlist report", which is sometimes called "watched pages". I think it's important, particularly for inexperienced editors, to clearly distinguish between a list of pages (the watchlist) and a list of edits that are related to the pages being watched (a report).

Since there was only one comment at WP:VPPR, what do other editors think? -- John Broughton (♫♫) 21:13, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

If there there was confusion on my part it was so brief that I've forgotten about it. I guess you could say it's similar to those situations where the verb and noun are the same word. There could be confusion but nearly always people figure out the correct meaning from context. As it is, the wording at the top of the watchlist recently changed from "View relevant changes" to "Display watched changes." Marc Kupper (talk) (contribs) 19:01, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

:D

Kind of an odd post and I'm not even sure if this is where it belongs, but I've only just discovered the extended watchlist feature, and I LOVE it. I just wanted to thank whoever was responsible for creating it, because it has certainly made my wikilife a whole lot easier (and because of that more enjoyable :) ) -- certainly one of those things I wish I'd known about earlier :) PageantUpdater talk • contribs 08:12, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

Lol, it took me about 6 months of being a serious editor to discover. I then felt embarrassed it had taken me so long. This is at the heart of good wikipedia practice. Thanks, SqueakBox 19:19, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Watchlist bolded

Pretty much all my watchlist entries are suddenly bolded. Even the ones where my edit is the last one. What's that about? I've never seen this before. -- VegitaU (talk) 02:13, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

I have the same gripe. ALL watchlist entries are bolded, including those that I have visited since the last change. Who approved this? WWGB (talk) 02:20, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Update - appears to be fixed. WWGB (talk) 02:23, 19 May 2008 (UTC)

Updates have to be done sometime, and unlike nation based sites wikipedia is truly a 24/7 website. Thanks, SqueakBox 19:17, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Secondary watchlist (probably a stupid question)

Hi there. I've been an editor for quite a while now, and have accumulated a rather large number of "watched" articles (as I'm sure most of us have). However, there is a smaller number of articles that I edit more intensively, and which I like to keep more of an eye on. Often my visits to Wikipedia are somewhat fleeting and I miss edits/vandalism to this shorter list since I don't have the time to wade through my watchlist. Does anyone know if it is possible to create a page in my space (here for example) where I can put this shorter list of articles so that I can quickly check them for recent edits? I reckon this isn't possible, since watchlists are such a deeply embedded feature of wikis, but I'd be delighted to know if there was a way of achieving this [*]. Cheers, --Plumbago (talk) 13:08, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

[*] Aside from methods like thinning my watchlist, or creating a secondary account that only watches my "favourite" articles.

More or less yes. Special:RelatedChanges/User:Plumbago/Shortlist will display all recent changes to articles wikilinked from User:Plumbago/Shortlist. For instance, User:TreasuryTag/Watchlist and Special:RelatedChanges/User:TreasuryTag/Watchlist function this way. JackSchmidt (talk) 15:06, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Set up a separate account and just use iut for the watchlist and open it in a different web browser. Thanks, SqueakBox 15:12, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi JackSchmidt - brilliant! That looks like exactly what I'm after. I'll give it a go. SqueakBox - thanks, but I already said I didn't fancy this way of doing it. Cheers, --Plumbago (talk) 16:59, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

Its a very good solution, I am near 5000 on mine and that in spite of regular vandalism move clearouts. Thanks for showing us that, SqueakBox 22:34, 29 May 2008 (UTC)

And, I have just noticed, if you want to add a talk page you have to add it to the shortlist manually, it wont do it automatically like in a primary watchlist. Thanks, SqueakBox 19:16, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

Yup. There was a discussion at WP:VP/T to automatically check talk pages too. I submitted a patch at some point that did this for articles, but there is a technical problem for categories. Which reminds me I should advertise one of the cooler uses: Special:RelatedChanges/Category:Even-toed ungulates. You can see all recent changes to any article in the category! Unfortunately the code that does this is basically independent of the article page related changes code (even though both are activated by looking Special:RelatedChanges), so making them both work they way people expect is hard, since people expect different code to behave as if it was all the same thing. JackSchmidt (talk) 19:26, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

My Watchlist isn't working

Ok, I have added tons of things to it, and then the next day nothing pops up and it basically means no edits have happened, but I look at some of the pages and they have been edited, is there something wrong with mine or should I have it on a certain setting or what??? I don't know, please help!Jonni Boi 15:58, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

You have to be logged in, of course. If you are, then click "my preferences" at the top of the screen, choose the "watchlist" tab, and have a look at the options there. You might have "ignore bot edits" checked, for example, which would cause certain edits not to show up. If you still can't find out what's wrong, come back here and maybe someone cleverer than either of us will be able to help.--Kotniski (talk) 17:19, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Also try the help desk which is watched by more people. This page is theoretically dedicated to improving the help pages, not directly helping people. Of course once we figure out the problem it might be a good reason to update the help page. JackSchmidt (talk) 17:32, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

"Do not watch" list?

If I want to watch a page, I add it to my watchlist. Quick and easy, works great. It's even automatic, since I have my preferences set to "watch pages I edit". And, I want to see all edits to those pages I watch. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be any way to perform the opposite function. I edit one of the reference desks, and I forget to uncheck the "Watch this page" box. Next time I look in my watchlist report, it's overrun with entries about the hundreds of edits to the refdesk page since I last logged in. Is there any way to tell the watchlist "Don't watch this page"? Simply clicking on the "unwatch" tab on top doesn't help, as five minutes from now I edit another section, and it's back on my watch list. Now, if I have a page on my list, and I edit that page again, it doesn't get added a second time, so the code that adds pages clearly reviews the list first to prevent duplicate entries. Is it possible (whoever has access to that code) to implement a "Don't watch" feature such that manually adding a line

"-Wikipedia:Reference desk/Language"

tells the code to not add this page to my watchlist, even though I forgot to uncheck the box? I'd like to keep the feature that says "automatically watch any page I edit", I just want to turn it off for a very few high-traffic pages. Specifically, the 8 desks. If I edit a particular section of the Science Desk, I do NOT want my watch report to be filled with the hundreds of edits to the rest of that page. I'd like to be able to tell the list to not add it. (Yes, this is pretty much a duplicate of a Village Pump/Help Desk section) -SandyJax (talk) 00:30, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Actually, I would like such a feature too (and for basically the same reason). To be clear, to get into this situation, a user has to make two changes to their preferences: watch pages I edit, and show all edits, not just the most recent. Disabling either of those also fixes the problem, but presumably some users (like me and presumably SJ) want both of those enabled. If someone doesn't have a premade solution, I'll write a short javascript thinger. JackSchmidt (talk) 17:57, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Here is a simple solution:

if( wgAction.match(/edit|submit/) && wgPageName.match(/Wikipedia:Reference_desk.*/) )
addOnloadHook(function(){ var o = document.getElementById("wpWatchthis"); if(o) o.checked=false;});

You add this to your personal javascript page at wikipedia, like User:SandyJax/monobook.js or for me User:JackSchmidt/chick.js. I thought there was a better help page, but WP:US might be the main page. It might be nice if it had an easily editable list of pages, but this just unchecks the "Watch this page" button for any page with "Wikipedia:Reference_desk" in its title. JackSchmidt (talk) 18:31, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Redlink page

I once had a page that was redlinked and in the WP: namespace on my watchlist.

I cannot remove it under any circumstances.

What should I do? Raymie Humbert (TrackerTV) (receiver, archives) 23:36, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Have you tried using the "View and Edit watchlist" or "edit raw watchlist" options? (The links for them are at the top of Special:Watchlist. --Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 22:49, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

RFCs not showing up on the watchlist?

I've opened a discussion over at the Village Pump (Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#RFCs_not_showing_up_on_my_watchlist). I'm worried that it's not receiving a lot of attention -- are other people experiencing this problem? II 07:13, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

When bot edits are not watched...

I think I've discovered a pseudo-bug, (glitch? minor irritation?) but equally this could be a FAQ.

I had my watchlist configured to ignore bot edits. What I thought this would mean is that I'd always see the last human edit to a watchlisted page. In effect what I get is that the watchlist drops the page altogether if the last edit was by a bot.

I think that people like me wanting to ignore bot edits will still want to see the human ones that may have preceeded the bot intervention.

For example, I'm a Crat here. I have WP:CHU (requests for changes of username) watchlisted, but it frequently doesn't show on my list because there are frequent bot edits doing automatic clerking of the requests that appear there. This is bad, because it means I'm not aware that a human request has taken place (prompting the auto-clerking).

Any thoughts? --Dweller (talk) 11:20, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it happens with me too. There is a way, by having the watch list expanded, then all edits will appear, except the bot edits (if no show). But in the expanded list, the edits get too crowded to be easily and efficiently dealt with. As far as I know, I believe the function to back track from a bot edit to a human edit in a non-expanded watch list does not exist. So I keep everything on. I hope this helps. — Orion11M87 (talk) 22:45, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree that this is a bug and should be changed. Same for minor edits. I understand the "expand" workaround, but the existence of a workaround doesn't change the fact that it's a bug.

Watchlisting all articles in a category

Is there a way to quickly add all articles in a given category to your watchlist? JodyB _talk 12:05, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, that's not available. If you are a programmer you can write a script that does this though you would then need to check the category from time to time to see if pages have been added/dropped. --Marc Kupper|talk 03:09, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Outside the scope of wikipedia there is a mediawiki extension which does similar to what your asking -Extension:CategoryWatch watches pages that are added or removed from categories --Zven (talk) 08:23, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Invert selection?

In "My watchlist/options" What is the "Invert selection" check box for? Also, I propose that there should be a Show/Hide Wikipedia: namespace button, so that I may see all my watched articles in all other namespaces but filter out the watched but infrequently edited policy pages that I only check occasionally, such as Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). OlEnglish (talk) 04:08, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

To the left of the Invert selection box is a selector for the namespace. Change the Namespace to something like Talk and press [Go]. You will only see Talk pages in the watchlist. Now check Invert selection and press [Go] again. You will see all pages that are not Talk pages. It allows you to do some filtering. I suspect the people that use this the most are those that monitor only for changes to articles and don't care about talk pages. See Wikipedia:Namespace and Help:Namespace for more about the namespace concept. --Marc Kupper|talk 03:04, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Marked as Patroled

Does Watchlisting a page automaticly mark it as being patroled? Dbiel ^(Talk) 13:40, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

No - if you are a Wikipedia page patroller then you will see ! next to items in RecentChanges. You click the "diff" link for that item and if it looks ok you click "Mark as patrolled." Ideally this would take you right back to RecentChanges but there's one more click to get to RecentChanges and the ! will be gone. This is a global thing meaning as soon as one patroller deals with a page then the ! will be removed from RecentChanges for all patrollers. See Help:Patrolled edit for more about this. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with watchlists. --Marc Kupper|talk 01:48, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Seeing edits since last visit or last patrol

Wikipedia:Watchlist#Recent and related changes, page history says

If one views the history of a watched page directly, without first viewing the page, the edit at the top (the most recent one) may be marked with update marker "updated (since my last visit)" (or the message with id 'updatedmarker' (talk)); this applies if the edit was made by someone else and you have not viewed the page (while logged in) since it was made.

Exactly what does this look like? I can't detect any difference in a watched page's history and there's no difference at all. I also checked the HTML and it's identical meaning it's not an element hidden by a CSS style. I see the word may is in there though without explanation. Is there anything I can/should do enable this?

While "updated (since my last visit)" will be helpful what I really want is a way to remove pages from the displayed watchlist while still watching them. For example, if I'm watching this help page I'd like to be able to flag it as "I've caught up on recent edits" and that it would vanish entirely from my watchlist, including the edits from yesterday and the day before, until someone makes a new edit. At that point it would reappear. That would allow me to clear the watchlist to a blank slate. I don't visit Wikipedia every hour, or even every day, meaning there may be several days of edits to look over in the articles I'm interested in. I'm aware of patrolling on RecentChanges and that method with the ! would also work if it was done with my watchlist. --Marc Kupper|talk 01:31, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

This question was accidentally x-posted here - I intended to post it to Wikipedia:Help desk#Seeing edits since last visit or last patrol and will relay any useful answers back here. --Marc Kupper|talk 01:50, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Below is the answer posted to the Wikipedia:Help desk by PrimeHunter. I updated the help to remove the outdated reference to the behavior of the history mechanism. --Marc Kupper|talk 02:53, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Watchlist redirects to Help:Watching pages. Many Help pages have content copied from meta. The update stuff originates from a copy from meta in 2005.[1]. Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)/Archive 39#Why are some items on watchlist showing as bold and items in history have odd message? from May 2008 says that shortly after being enabled on Wikipedia in May 2008 it was disabled again due to problems. I don't know whether anything has changed since then. I have never seen the message. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:22, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

404 after watch page

For some reason I get a 404 after clicking "watch this page". This has never happened before, and has only happened in the past few days. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs 12:10, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

The watchlist mechanism has changed quite recently and it sounds like they broke something. The old mechanism took you to a separate page that said The page "PageName" has been added to your watchlist. ...". That been changed so that you stay on the same page and instead a message gets added to the top about it being added or removed from the watchlist. It sounds like they broke things for some users. I would bring this to the attention of the Wikipedia:Help_desk with the question being how to get your feedback routed to the MediaWiki developers and or the Wikipedia admins that deal with updating the software as it's more likely a MediaWiki rather than Wikipedia thing. --Marc Kupper|talk 19:46, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Letter "m" next to some of my watchlist entries?

A small boldface letter "m" appears next to some of my watchlist entries. Could someone tell me what it means please? RB1956 (talk) 21:36, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

It means that it was a minor edit. --- RockMFR 21:40, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

Seeing which watchlist pages have Prods or AfDs?

Is there a way of viewing My watchlist to show only those pages on my watchlist which have had Prods or AfD notices added? I noticed today on my watchlist an article was deleted with the message "Expired PROD" but I had failed to notice the prod being added. Шизомби (talk) 07:23, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

Idea

Would it be a good idea to mark changes you have performed yourself in bold on your watchlist? It would help distinguish what you need to keep an eye on. just a little insignificant 15:14, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

• I would like this feature. Libcub (talk) 16:19, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Removing watched articles

I have a wide range of interests and consequently have a large watchlist. I have difficulty getting it down below about 6,500 at any one time. I don't know whether that's unusual for WP, but it doesn't bother me either way. I do a lot of category sorting and other activities of that nature. I could choose not to watch those sorts of pages, but I usually like to keep watching them for a while to see if anyone undoes or reverts what I've done. After a while, if there have been no objections, I remove them from my watchlist. But it's a very tedious process. The article in question comes up on my watchlist; then I have to click on "diff" or "hist", unwatch the article, then return to the watchlist. I have to repeat that process for every article I want to remove.

Mostly, I know immediately I see the article on my watchlist that I'm not interested in watching it anymore. Wouldn't it be great to have a link next to each article called "unwatch", enabling editors to unwatch the article directly from the watchlist, without having to go into diff or hist first. Can this be done? -- JackofOz (talk) 03:50, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree this would be nice (maybe if we keep asking the developers, they might eventually do it). But one useful tool is the popups gadget (on the gadgets tab of user preferences, I think). This makes it slightly quicker (among many other things) to unwatch a page from the watchlist or any other place where it's linked. --Kotniski (talk) 08:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

The problem I see with a tag like this is that you've already got the "diff" and "hist" tags on one side, the "undo" and maybe "rollback" tags on the other side, and another tag would clutter it up. Don't get me wrong, I have the same problem, and I like the idea, but I don't have the creative genius to know where it should be placed. Someone else probably does, but who? just a little insignificant 13:43, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Show * not working?

I'm having a weird problem lately. If I select to hide anything in my watchlist via the links: Hide minor edits | Hide bots | Hide anonymous users | Hide logged-in users | Hide my edits, then it's impossible to undo this, via the "Show" textlinks. The link labels change from Hide to Show, but the actual link still has the hide parameter, e.g. "Show minor edits" links to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&hideMinor=1 (last part should hideMinor=0). This happens cross wiki (at least it happens on French and Greek wikis). Any idea what's wrong? --Ferengi (talk) 07:32, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

Never mind. It's a known bug, to be fixed in a future update. --Ferengi (talk) 10:28, 5 July 2009 (UTC)

No emails from my watchlist

I setup my preferences to get E-mail when a page on my watchlist is changed. But I don’t get changes emailed. How do I get changes emailed? Mschribr (talk) 13:44, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

Older version of this page?

Seems that Wikipedia:Watchlist help redirects to Help:Watching pages, but Wikipedia talk:Watchlist help (at which I arrived through Google) does not redirect to Help talk:Watching pages (this page). Should some admin make that talk page redirect and do a history merge or whatever? Shreevatsa (talk) 14:55, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

[Old news, FWIW:] this was fixed a while ago. Shreevatsa (talk) 10:14, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Watch in Beta

Should there be mention of where the Watch function can be found in Beta? Took me a moment to find that it is revealed by the arrow to the right of "View history." I'm not really sure what the purpose of making that function less visible is. Шизомби (talk) 03:39, 7 August 2009 (UTC)

Raw watchlist/weird shit

I was just looking at my raw watchlist, and there seems to be a ton of weird shit on it that I've never looked at. Lots of stuff involving someone named 'Hagger' or some such. Where did it come from? What does it mean? john k (talk) 01:06, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

When a vandal moves a page to a new title the new page gets automatically added to your watchlist. When the vandalism is removed the new page remains on your watchlist. Hagger is a vandal.--Commander Keane (talk) 01:17, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Irritating! john k (talk) 01:40, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

Underlines on minor edits

The new underline in addition to the bolding for the m minor edit is especially ugly. The legend is a dumb and cluttery idea. --Knulclunk (talk) 13:03, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

To hide the legend insert this code into your monobook.css :

div.mw-rc-label-legend {display: none;}

Don't know how to hide the underline. -- œ^™ 22:24, 17 September 2009 (UTC)

But who changed it in the first place and why? Lugnuts (talk) 08:16, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

To remove the underlines use this code in your monobook.css:

abbr.newpage {border:0;}
abbr.bot {border:0;}
abbr.minor {border:0;}

Don't know who and why changed it.. I'd have to look for the discussion somewhere, if it exists.. maybe somewhere on the mediawiki developers mailing list? -- œ^™ 23:30, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Found it: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15871 -- œ^™ 23:33, 19 September 2009 (UTC)

Brilliant - thanks for your help! Lugnuts (talk) 12:06, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

Watching a user?

Is there any way to watch or track a user so I could be updated anytime a particular user makes an edit? There is no "watch" tab on user contrib pages. Fredwerner (talk) 15:08, 7 October 2009 (UTC)