Watchlists
From Planipedia
Watching pages feature allows any logged in user to keep a list of "watched" pages so they are notified of edits to these pages. The page is always watched together with its talk page.
Controlling which pages are watched
Choose to add a page to your watchlist by:
- Clicking the "Watch" tab on the top menu bar while viewing the main page
- Checking the "Watch this page" option when saving an edited page
- Turning on the automatic "Add pages I edit to my watchlist" option in your user preferences
- "Add pages I create to my watchlist", "Add pages I move to my watchlist" or "Add pages I delete to my watchlist" also in user preferences
- Editing your entire Watchlist
You can edit your Watchlist using the full list of linked watched pages (including the talk pages). Selecting one or several checkboxes and then clicking "Remove titles" button will remove selected pages from the list.
My Watchlist
When the user is logged in, every page has a link to the user's watchlist. This page shows a list of all recently changed watched pages, separated by days, ordered backward according to the time of the edit.
Each line shows details of each edit: whether minor (m) or major, the time, a link to the page, the difference between the current version and the last one, the history, the increase or decrease of the number of bytes, the user name, the user's talk page, the user's contributions and the edit summary. Depending on site configuration, the page name is bolded if the page has changed after the last time the user viewed the page (while logged in).
Options One can hide or show some types of edits: minor edits, bot edits, one's own edits. These can also be set in preferences as initial options when the user comes to the My Watchlist page.
There is also a drop-down box that allows to see the changes only in one specific namespace.
Watchlists cannot hide edits by logged in/logged out users, there are no links to show only specific number of edits, and there is no way to show all namespaces except one.
Simple Watchlist + By default your watchlist only shows the last edit to each watched page. This is slightly problematic if a page had a non-minor recent edit, but the last edit was marked as minor since the non-minor edits will not be shown, or if your watchlist is set not to show minor changes, then the page will not appear in the watchlist at all. Many experienced users prefer to use Expanded Watchlist, or alternatively you can check the "history" of the pages on your watchlist.
Expanded Watchlist With the preference "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" the watchlist will show all recent edits, listed in chronological order.
Another preference option is "Maximum number of changes to show in expanded watchlist". To show pages with older edits, view the changes by namespaces or use the non-enhanced watchlist, and/or reduce the number of watched pages.
To learn more about Watchlists you can also visit Help:Watching Pages.
