Help:Watchlist labels
The watchlist labelling feature of MediaWiki allows you to add labels to items in your watchlist to help with managing and filtering watchlists, especially large ones. You could add a label for pages you created, pages you are temporarily monitoring for vandalism, discussion pages, or any other kind of categorisation. This feature is only available for logged in users, and not for temporary accounts.
You can create up to 100 labels (with names up to 255 bytes long) and apply them to as many watchlist items as you like. After creating labels, they can be assigned to watch pages, and used to filter edits at Special:Watchlist. Each page can have multiple labels applied. All labels are private.
Note that for wikis using MobileFrontend and Minerva Neue, watchlist labels are only available in advanced mode.
Managing labels
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When you are viewing Special:Watchlist you will see multiple tabs in the top of the page - one of them is "Manage labels". This will take you to a page that will list all of your existing labels (Special:WatchlistLabels), and allow you to create new ones.
Adding and editing labels
[edit]To create a label, click the "New label" button at the top of the table. This will open a form where you can enter the new label name. Label names have a maximum length of 255 bytes (i.e. characters, although note that some characters are larger than one byte). Any whitespace characters at the beginning or end of the label name will be trimmed. After you save a new label, you will be returned to the table displaying all of your labels.
Using the edit icon next to each label, you can go back into the form and make changes to the name. Note that no history of your changes is kept. Label names are unique - if you edit a label name to be a duplicate of any of your existing labels, you will not be able to save it.
Deleting labels
[edit]To delete one or more labels select them via the checkboxes in the label list, and click the Delete button at the top of the list.
This will ask you for confirmation and tell you how many watchlist items each label is assigned to.
This can not be undone.
Deleting a label does not remove any items that had that label from your watchlist, but does erase any history of this label being assigned to certain pages. You cannot recover this information after deleting a label.
Assigning labels to watchlist items
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When on the Edit watchlist tab (Special:EditWatchlist) you can select watchlisted items via the checkboxes and then add or remove one or more labels via the Assign labels and Remove labels buttons.
When you remove a page from your watchlist, its label assignments are removed along with it. There is no way to undo this. The labels themselves are not changed, including when a label is assigned to no pages at all.
Filtering the watchlist by label
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When viewing your watchlist, you can filter the edits shown to those made to pages assigned with one or more labels.
This can be done via the Labels filter dropdown, or by typing the = filter prefix in the filter search bar.
Introductory popups
[edit]The first time you load Special:Watchlist a series of two or three introductory popups will be displayed, highlighting the existence of the new feature. (Whether it's two or three popups depends on whether you are using the filters for edit review feature or not.) You can click through the popups and click the 'Got it' button at the end, and they will not be shown again.
Dismissing the popups saves an API preference for your account, indicating that they shouldn't be shown again. If you wish to remove the preference, so that you can see the popups again, you can run the following line in your browser's console:
(new mw.Api()).saveOption( 'watchlistlabelonboarding', null );
Exporting your labels
[edit]All of your watchlist labels are included in the data export that's available on Special:Preferences via the My account data from this project link.
Useful links
[edit]Please report any issues with this feature on the Watchlist-Labels Phabricator project.
The watchlist labels feature was built by the WMF's Community Tech team. Details of the development project are on the project page on Meta Wiki.