The idea came up after seeing a soccer player transfer, from one club to another, that went unnoticed for several weeks. Usually the player page is the first to get updated and if you could see the club mentioned as having a transfer in or out, you could update the clubs pages as well.
Switching to the mobile interface will display the old display, without the filters. If you force purposefully the desktop view on mobile, you will get the filters, which are, indeed, not mobile compatible.
That's not the whole story. I use desktop only (no interest in mobile) and, while the new watchlist has some cool features, it certainly does "jump all over the place" as OP describes. I may be trying to click on items in the history, and suddenly the whole thing leaps away from me as a large JavaScript panel loads into place. I might even hit Rollback by accident, which is embarrassing. Can't you pre-load an empty white space to prevent things from jumping? (BTW this is true in other places too, like the late-loading Citations tab on Wiktionary.) My computer is old and slow but I shouldn't be punished for that.
I wouldn't suppose the developers wanted to punish the people with old and slow computers. I would suppose they would have missed this use case (it's really hard to develop software that works out-of-the-box for everyone!) . It might be of help to them if you could provide more information about your configuration in which you face this issue: OS, browser (with versions). They might use it to see if they could do something about it.
A temporary solution would be to switch to the old interface if that worked well for you. You could do that via Special:Preferences.
I mean that the page loads, and then further additional things load (like extra tabs), and as those things appear, the page "reflows" (like adding words in the middle of a paragraph) so that things I am trying to click on might continue to move to new positions. It would be better if the page didn't appear at all until everything was in place -- since having things jump away from under the mouse pointer is very frustrating.
Within the "latest changes", I'd like to search only within a specific category, e.g. "Kategori:Ryska/Substantiv" when I'm in Swedish Wiktionary (or the corresponding "Category:Russian_nouns" in English Wiktionary).
I tried to select "Kategori" ("Category") in the search help but that just filtered to show changes on any "Category" page, not within a specific category. And trying to add "Kategori:Ryska/Substantiv" in the search field didn't work (adding it and pressing ENTER had no effect).
Is there some way to filter the search results to only be within one (or a few) select category? If not, could it be added?
At the moment, it is not possible to filter in categories, because of their depth. The categorization tree is too chaotic on most wikis to be properly used.
There's already a way to exclude all talk pages in Special:RecentChanges. You just have to tap on the 'Namespaces' menu. Then choose the 'Exclude selected' option after which you have to choose just the 'Talk' namespace.
Okay. Currently the only way I could think of doing that is to manually exclude all talk page namespaces once and create a saved filter out of it. That way you could get easily filter out all talk pages by using the saved filter in future.
This is currently a work around. Having a feature to exclude all talk page namespaces at once seems to be a nice feature to have.
Sadly, it is not plausible to make such a filter without a huge amount of work. I looked into this for Commons, but given the way that the changes are stored by Wikibase, it's not possible to extend the recent changes filtering system on the database side to evaluate these diffs and categorise them, sorry.
I second that request, also I am more interested in the opposite: changes in the statements. Currently, my watchlist is flooded by new labels for languages I don't care, but I am never sure whether maybe also some statements changed. Filtering just for the changes of statements would make my watchlist usabel again.
Thanks for the quick reply. I already have that box ticked. I was hoping for a traditional plain watchlist like I use on enwiki, but it looks as if that feature's no longer available on mw.
That helps a tiny bit, but the box needs to be much wider. I want much longer descriptions so that I can quickly scan the list and pick the sets I like.
What developers need to understand is that many editors, if not most, desire SPEED. All changes to the watchlist should be made with that in mind.
What are the default filters? Or is default to show all contributions (no active filters)? I see no "default" button for a pre-selected list of active filters chosen by the wiki admins. If default is to show all contributions, then I believe many editors will stop using their watchlist very much, if at all.
Anyone with a lot of categories on their watchlist may give up as I almost did before someone selected some filters for me. See my other thread. The filters are baffling, even to longtime editors. The "all contributions" watchlist shows all the many files added and removed from those watchlisted categories. That makes the watchlist very long and almost useless. One can't find the important stuff buried among the files being added and removed.
A pre-selected fallback list of active filters might keep many editors from abandoning their watchlist over time. There needs to be a filter to show all revisions, except for revisions for talk pages. The filter should set talk pages to latest revision. Otherwise the same active talk pages will show up on every day of the watchlist. I like seeing all revisions (for most things), but had to turn it off due to talk pages filling up my watchlist.
Default filters are the ones people got when they opened the watchlist the first time on the old configuration. You see all contributions.
You can redefined default filters by clearing all of them (trash bin icon), which will give you access to the "restaure default filters". It is possible to define a different set of filters for your wiki, after a community consensus.
You can personally set your favorite set of filters, by saving a preset and defining by default.
You can exclude some namespaces, for instance talk pages (click on "namespace", then select one or multiple namespaces, then click on "excluding namespaces"). That selection can be saved for you as well, so that you can switch to it anytime.
I have been talking about the Commons watchlist.
I suggest that "Restore default filters" be supplemented and improved with 2 options that are always visible:
"Restore my saved default filters".
"Restore the Commons default filters".
What do you mean by "old configuration"? Are you talking about checking the box for the setting, "Hide the improved version of the watchlist":
Default Commons filters are the ones you get when you access your watchlist the first time, if you haven't changed them. If you wish to define another set of filters as default, you can save them as "Commons default filters". Then you can switch between "Restore my saved default filters" and "Commons default filters".
To get the last revision of talk pages exclusively, you combine two filters: the one for talk pages and the one for "latest revision". You can go further and filter multiple kind of talk pages, differentiating them using highlights (here yellow for Talk: and green for File talk:).
Both of the talk page filter combinations ended up with empty watchlists. I looked back 14 days too. So they are not allowing talk pages at all on the watchlist.
Empty results mean that there is no changes on talk pages you watch for those combinations. I don't have changes on my volunteer's account watchlist either.
You can test those combinations on RecentChanges to be sure they're working. Just change "Watchlist" by "RecentChanges" in the URL:
I suppose there isn't a direct Generic talk filter. But, I think you could use the "Exclude selected" option and do some magic with it. For example the linked set of filters would show you all the RecentChanges to the talk pages in en.wikipedia. That's done by excluding all the corresponding article namespaces.
I apologize for my English - this is definitely not my native language.
I liked the last update very much, but I'm having a repeating problem, which is that discussions about an article "flood" my Watchlist, causing important changes to be missed.
My suggestion to you: If there is more than one update from the same article on the same day, reduce the display of all these updates together to one line with a certain visualization that can be clicked on to see all the other changes of the same article (I mean the last change will seem the same, and all the rest will reduced to the same row, so we're talking about two lines altogether, that will contain all the changes of the same article).
For my opinion, this can be a very useful option in the Watchlist menu, and I'm sure it will benefit many editors.
Thanks and good night/day, depends on your place on the planet:)
This is already implemented – on the RecentChanges or Watchlist page, click the view control which defaults to "50 changes, 7 days" on most wikis, and enable "Group results by page". It's sometimes called "Enhanced" mode, and it probably should be the default.
