Talk:Moderator Tools/Watchlist/Experiment

Notes from experiment setup

Running notes can go here :) JVanderhoop-WMF (talk) 20:23, 31 July 2025 (UTC)

Group by pages is not suitable for ENWP if you watch >50 articles

The reasoning here makes a lot of sense – users are overburdened with the complexity of the Watchlist and don't discover many of its useful features. However, I don't understand this fascination some have with the Group by page feature and the continued lack of a simple straightforward since-last-seen diff button that would save unmeasurably many hours of volunteer time. So I doubt the premise of the experiment that this feature would be useful to many – it's not useful on very active Wikipedias – English Wikipedia at least – if you have any kind of normal count of articles on your Watchlist i.e. aren't totally new and are actually extensively using Wikipedia as an active editor then toggling this setting on will just clutter the Watchlist a lot and not be useful at all but cost you lots of time. It's grouping changes per page per day but not per your entire Watchlist. Who would benefit from this?!

Instead, I'd suggest to highlight the setting of the Watchlist to show just the latest revision of a page – maybe once the user passed a certain number of pages on the Watchlist if that's not yet the default. In addition, there could be a link to the Global Watchlist which has additional features or porting those features to the Wikipedia Watchlist. That Watchlist does have the core function of a since-last-seen-diff button (when "Group results by page" is enabled in the settings and there it's quite hidden and could be highlighted) but because there are some easily fixable issues like a useless huge sea of blue of usernames next to each page that one can't disable, it can't be used – see m:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Hide the list of recent editors next to article titles in the Global Watchlist. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:04, 17 September 2025 (UTC)