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Ability to watch lists of pages, e.g. all sub-pages of a page
Open, LowestPublicFeature

Description

Author: gangleri

Description:

  • As a user closely following a busy discussion or process page (organised in subpages), I want to be able to see in Special:Watchlist all its updates (all the changes to all subpages), without manually adding each separate entry to my watchlist, so that I can save clicks and see all discussions in their entirety.
  • As a user working on a topic, or very interested in a set of pages (e.g. a mainspace list of mainspace pages; or a wikiproject-like work list), I want to be able to see in Special:Watchlist updates to all of them, and to (un)follow them all with a click or by editing the wiki page, so that I can save clicks and share the maintenance of the "watchlist" with others.

(Originally split from bug 2294#c2)

Hallo!

[[en:Template:ARTICLESPACE/]] is related (in a construct with a set of
templates) to [[en:Template:To do]]. The last creates "/to do" subpages.

If you watch a page normaly you watch the TALK page by default. A future
atribute BUNDLE for subpages should allow watching pages and subpages where this
atribute is set automaticaly.

It could be used for archives and project pages.


This request is very similar to T3710: Ability to watch all articles in a category, in that the users currently can open Special:RecentChangesLinked, or subscribe to its feed, to see all changes to pages in a category or list, and in that it would be nice for such a "feed" to be integrated in Special:Watchlist.


Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz2308

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 21 2014, 8:34 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz2308.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

rowan.collins wrote:

As somebody pointed out on another bug report I just read, it's best to start
with a description of the problem and only later suggest possible solutions.

In this case, I think the problem you're trying to solve is "automatically watch
all sub-pages of this page"; this implies several things:

  1. the ability to add multiple pages to the watchlist "as a bundle" - as with

bug 1710, this could, at its simplest, be done by generating a list of all
eligible pages at the time of request, and adding each one to the watchlist
(remember that a sub-page of "X" is simply one whose title begins "X").
Alternatively, you could have a special watchlist entry for "any title matching
this pattern", but this might make displaying the user's watchlist even more
inefficient than I believe it already is.

  1. the ability to *remove* multiple pages from the watchlist "as a bundle" -

again, this could be implemented simply by searching the watchlist for matching
pages at the time of request; the "edit watchlist" page could perhaps group them
as sets (which might be nice anyway) and provide an "unwatch this and all
sub-pages" link where appropriate.

  1. the ability to automatically start watching certain new pages - this is a

much larger problem, but might be necessary to make this watching a "bundle" of
sub-pages truly effective and useful; basically, it would require some way of
filtering the log of new pages (and moved pages) to look for ones which were
part of a watched "bundle" - where the "bundle" would probably be stored as a
watchlist entry for the "parent" page with a special flag set.

Notice that none of these require any changes to either the "parent page" or the
sub-pages themselves - if I've understood your intention correctly, the feature
would most logically be provided as an option on any page [in a namespace that
"allows" sub-pages] to the user who's doing the watching. Note also that the
features required could equally be applied more generally - in particular #3, if
it could be implemented efficiently, might be useful as some kind of "watch for
new articles with names matching <pattern>".

Michael.Keppler wrote:

I also think that the proposed solution is really bad for the problem to be
tackled. Especially as the _editor_ of a page would decide which pages are added
to the watchlist of _someone else_. A solution for adding/removing bunches of
pages to/from the watchlist should never ever be triggered by page content or
page attributes. It _must_ always be in the responsibility of the person who is
adding pages to his/her watchlist, so the searching or the pattern matching
proposed by Imsop are way better as a solution.

zigger wrote:

*** Bug 3113 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

  • Bug 12308 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

mike.lifeguard+bugs wrote:

The current workaround is to use Special:RecentChangesLinked which is generally found to be inadequate.

Changed component to "Watchlist"

Open since 2005, inactive in the past three years... If we want to reflect the current plans, this should be "lowest".

(In reply to Quim Gil from comment #7)

Open since 2005, inactive in the past three years... If we want to reflect
the current plans, this should be "lowest".

Setting accordingly. No one in Platform is working on this, but as always, patches are welcome.

Nemo_bis renamed this task from ability to watch "bundles" of sub-pages to Ability to watch lists of pages, e.g. all sub-pages of a page.Jan 16 2015, 9:06 PM
Nemo_bis updated the task description. (Show Details)
Nemo_bis set Security to None.

Not a complete solution but Extension:WatchSubpages was created for some of the use cases.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:02 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.
kostajh subscribed.

The Growth-Team does not plan to work on this in the short-to-medium term.