Help:Watchlist

Find traditional instrumental music

Your watchlist is a display for tracking changes, similar to the recentchanges display, but limited to showing changes only across your set of "watched" pages. You can see your watchlist by following the watchlist link in your account menu (on the top right). This feature is only available to users who have registered and logged in.

Add pages to watchlist

Before you see anything interesting here, you have to actually add some pages to your watchlist. Do so by navigating to a page that interests you, and click the star icon title=Template:Int(or watch tab).

A page already in your watchlist will be marked with a blue star title=Template:Int (or watch tab).

If you want to remove pages from your watchlist, click on the blue star icon title=Template:Int (or watch tab).

Why a watchlist

The watchlist feature is mainly useful on a very busy wiki where the recentchanges display becomes too overwhelming with many changes you don't want to follow. On a typical low traffic wiki, you can normally see all of the editing activity across the whole wiki without feeling overwhelmed. On a more busy wiki you will find that many edits are taking place on pages which you personally find less interesting. To help track changes which are more interesting, start watching pages!

Typically you would watch pages related to your interest areas, and also pages where you care most about the content. If you make a significant edit to a page, you might want to watch the page (so you know when there are any follow-up edits). Note that there is a also a checkbox on the edit screen for this purpose.

Your watchlist is personal. You can watch any page you want. That choice will remain private.

Use your watchlist

On the watchlist display, some page names appear in bold. This indicates whether or not you have visited the page to see the change. It's a bit like read/unread emails in an email inbox. The display will also have some new bold highlighting, but for a different reason. Here bold is just indicating edits to pages on your watchlist.

You can combine different kinds of filters to display the results you want.

Email notifications

According to the relevant changes to pages you watch may also be notified to you by email.

The main preference for this is 1.

After receiving an email notification for a page, you have to visit the page while logged in if you want to be notified of further changes to the same page.


Watchlist feed with token

You can set up an RSS or Atom feed of your watchlist that is accessible even when logged out:

  • Get your watchlist token from Special:Preferences/Watchlist
  • If you would prefer an Atom feed rather than an RSS one, add &feedformat=atom to the Link of your feed.
  • To further customise your watchlist feed add different parameters to the link, see API:Watchlist_feed .