Help:Watching pages

<-MediaWiki User's Guide

When logged in, users should see a link in the sidebar entitled "Watch this page" on non-dynamically-generated pages. By clicking on that link, you add the current page to the collection of articles you "watch". You can access your watchlist by clicking the "My watchlist" link in the sidebar or choosing "My watchlist" from the "Special pages" menu at the top of each page and pressing "Go". Your watchlist approximately functions as a custom recent changes just for articles that you watch. It gives a list of all watched pages, ordered backward according to the time of the last edit of the page, optionally up to some cutoff time.

For performance reasons on many Wikipedia wikis, the initial cutoff is currently one hour for users with over 250 pages in their watchlists.

Each line shows details about the last edit: the day, whether minor or major, the time, a link to the article, the difference between the current version and the last but one, the history, the user name and the edit summary.

Note that for every edited page only information about the last edit is shown. For example, if the last edit was minor there is no indication whether there have also been major changes recently. Since one is typically interested in all changes since one last checked, the history of the article needs to be checked.

In Recent Changes and Enhanced Recent Changes, watched articles are bolded. Therefore, even without ever using "My watchlist", specifying articles to watch is useful.

Watching and unwatching
There's a handy "watch this page" or "stop watching this page" link in the sidebar when viewing any Wikipedia page while logged in.

Users can also specify that a page must be watched while editing that page:

On the editing screen, next to the minor edit checkbox, there is another checkbox with the text "Watch this page". Activating this checkbox and saving the article produces the identical result to clicking the link mentioned above. When viewing a watched page, the "Watch this page" link text changes to "Stop watching". Clicking that link removes the article from your watchlist. Deactiving the checkbox "Watch this page" before saving an article has the same result.

If you want to watch all your articles by default, you can activate the user preference "Watch new and modified pages".

If you find after a while that you've got a lot more pages watched than you want, there's a handy link at the top of the Watchlist which will display your entire watchlist in alphabetical order. From there you can remove pages en masse by doing a lot of clicking of checkboxes.