Thread:Talk:New editor engagement/Watchlists/reply (5)

Watchlist wishlist is quite a mouthful :)

I've been agitating for more work on watchlists, which I think are a critical and, sadly, much-neglected feature in our arsenal. As a result, the mobile team has actually done a significant UI overhaul on watchlists on the mobile site. I'd urge you to visit en.m.wikipedia.org (or the .m version of any Wikimedia wiki) and check it out for yourself. In addition to addressing some of the power user problems highlighted in your wishlist (e.g., improving selection/clearing of items, adding a direct unwatch link in the watchlist view), we're also just generally trying to make watchlists easier to understand for new users, who are resoundingly mystified/terrified by the strange mishmash of jargon and input/selection menus they're presented with when they visit their watchlist. The underlying concept (save pages you care about, follow changes to them) is actually quite simple, but the archaic Internet 1.0 interface in which we couch the feature ensures that only the bravest souls will persevere to figure that out.

I should note that the one major impediment to doing more design and development work on the watchlist is not that nobody cares (I do!), but rather that highly active users are extremely attached to their preferred watchlist workflow, and disrupting that even a tiny bit (as was the case with the much-maligned green-stars-next-to-unviewed-changes experiment) tends to cause a huge stir. The benefit of implementing some of these ideas on mobile is that there is little pushback from the existing community, so we can truly reinvent the watchlist from the ground up; the corresponding drawback, unfortunately, is that it's hard to validate whether the ideas are successful or not when most highly active Wikimedians aren't using them.