Thread:Talk:New editor engagement/Watchlists/reply (13)

Global watchlists would also make any work that Meta and Commons do on behalf of many projects, visible and trackable by the communities on those projects. They would minimize the importance of deciding 'which wiki to hold a conversation on' for global topics. And they would facilitate multilingual discussion.

This is particularly true if these features are developed along with a "watchfeed" which is not a personal single-user watchlist but a feed of updates from a set of related pages. Then anyone interested in a topic can help curate the watchfeed for that topic - across wikis and languages. And others who want to follow that topic will have an information-dense way to do so. RC really implements a special case of watchlisting; both benefit from similar views and filters. Though for performance reasons you might want to restrict who can add large categories, or "en.wp:*", to a watchfeed.