Help:Watching pages

Anyone may choose to be notified when a certain page changes using "watch" and "my watchlist". MediaWiki doesn't let people "own" pages, however, this feature and the ability to revert pages, provides the most needed functionality&mdash;without the drawbacks of giving somebody absolute control over a page.

Note that the watchlist feature is not as reliable as Recent Changes and Related Changes: it gives more often "Database error" without any further explanation. Even if Related Changes has equal difficulty in allowing watching a large set of pages, the difference is that when using a set of pages with links as a set of separate watchlists, a list that gets too large can simply be split.

The main drawback of the latter possibility is that it does not have the feature that edited pages are automatically added to the collection of watched pages.

Use
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 and the corresponding talk page (or if it is a talk page, that page and the corresponding non-talk page) to the collection of pages 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 pages 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.

The default cutoff for the watchlist is currently three days for users with less than 1000 pages in their watchlists and 12 hours for Wikipediholics with more than 1000.

Each line shows details about the last edit: the day, whether minor or major, the time, a link to the page, the difference between the current version and the last but one, the history, the user name and the edit summary. There is currently no way to exclude minor changes from the watchlist.

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 page needs to be checked.

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

Watching and unwatching
All additions to and deletions from the list of watched pages apply to the non-talk page / talk page combination: one can not watch one and not watch the other.

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 page 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 page and its talk page from your watchlist. Deactiving the checkbox "Watch this page" before saving an page has the same result.

Furthermore you can activate the user preference "Add pages you edit to your watchlist".

A list of watched pages, with the possibility of en masse unwatching pages by clicking checkboxes, can be done conveniently using, also available as link at the top of the Watchlist.

Watching a non-existing page
You can also watch a non-existing page. Then you see it on your watchlist when somebody creates it. This is often the case for talk pages. For a non-talk page, if the page has a (broken) link to it, press that link and press "Watch" (depending on the skin you may have to press Cancel before getting the link Watch). You can also go to the non-existing page using the URL.

Deletion of pages
Oddly, the deletion of a watched page is not shown in the watchlist!

Also, shows all watched non-talk pages, including the deleted ones. Since the pages in the list are given in the form of links, deleted ones are easily identified, especially if you normally do not watch nonexisting non-talk pages.

However, talk pages are not listed separately, hence deletion of a talk page can not be detected in this manner. In particular talk pages of template pages are vulnerable: content that is valuable enough for a non-talk page could be put here, if, by the nature of the template, it is not suitable for the template page itself.

Using a set of pages with links as a set of separate watchlists
Pages with links (possibly specially created for this purpose, e.g. as subpages of one's user page) can be used with Related Changes as a collecting of separate "watchlists". Note however that unlike My Watchlist, Related Changes does not automatically include talk pages; to watch also the corresponding talk pages, links to them also have to be in the page on which Related Changes is applied. If the links to the talk pages are put just for this purpose, a blank space as link label can be used, which makes the link invisible and ineffective, except for Related Changes. See e.g. List of astronomical topics and its wikitext, with items in the form Main Page  showing up as just Main Page.

Note that Related Changes does not detect an edit in the page itself and its talk page. Either include a self-link and a link to the talk page in the page, or put the page in another "special watchlist", or in one's standard watchlist.

Such pages can use the template mechanism to include other pages. However, see Pollution of categories.

Watching pages in a category by applying Related Changes to the category has a major drawback: removal of a page from the category is not detected.

Watching a category or an image
Watching a category or an image means watching the editable part. Adding a page to, and removing a page from a category is not reported. The same applies for changing the image.

Css
As an alternative or in addition to using the watchlist feature, one can also define a user style for links to selected pages, putting in one's CSS a list of lines like:


 * a[title ="pagename"] {color: white; background: red; font-size: 150% }

This works in Opera, but not in IE.

On the (Enhanced) Recent Changes page it works like the bolding feature mentioned above, but it is more versatile, e.g. allowing extra emphasis on pages one is very interested in, or different styles for different categories of interesting pages. Furthermore, it also works on user contributions pages, and on regular pages (also for piped links, but not for indirect links through a redirect). It also applies, less usefully, for the section editing links in the page itself.

To highlight links to the given page also from other websites, including interlanguage links, use instead of the above:


 * a[href ="full url "] { .. }

Note that the full url is needed, even to highlight links from the same project, although the HTML code uses the relative url /wiki/pagename.

Article hit statistics
There is a counter for page views of a given page, but on Wikimedia sites it has been disabled for performance reasons.