Ah, per https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Watching_pages#Watchlist "Technically, the watchlist is just another way to filter recent changes. The entries come from the recentchanges table and are therefore restricted to edits not older than $wgRCMaxAge (30 days in most WMF projects)." so that's a completely different issue, and not likely to change. I'll edit the task title/description to reduce this to just the page limit item.

I have that question here, to increase the limit to 5000, or, if not possible, 2000 edits, "to catch old vandalisms". What are the blockers, other than an impossible to load watchlist (that people will ask to fix, ans so on...)?

If people want to find old vandalism, better ways to do that might be 1) for the user to use ORES filters to hone in on edits likely to be vandalism, 2) for us to add pagination. With pagination you could click "next 500" ten times, instead of having to wait 10x as long to load a single batch of 5k edits.

I like that option of pagination while ORES is not available on all wikis.

I am a bit surprised by the merge of tasks. I was under the impression (from comments by "(WMF)"-Accounts), that by now the watchlist size should already have been increased to 2000. (planned for Q4/2020).

I also like to remark, that even 2000 is extremly to low. Especially edits with QuickStatments (that can be done by any IP) can and do flood a watchlist with 1000, 2000 or more edits in 24 or 5 hours.

The upload wizard allows to upload 500 files with a single action, resulting in 1500 watchlist entries. If you also watch the categories, that you add in the upload wizard a single use of the wizard can result in 10000 or 20000 watchlist entries. (in reality the upload wizard breaks if you try to upload more than 110 to 170 files, and often doesn't work at all, but still) Adding SDC tags in the wizard makes is even worse.

In T151165#6638039, @C.Suthorn wrote:

I was under the impression that by now the watchlist size should already have been increased to 2000.

@C.Suthorn: I wasn't... :) Please point out a specific comment (URL) and a sentence which implies so. Thanks!

I have spent a quarter of an hour trying to find the comment, but could not locate it. it is on a page on meta or on commons probably in the commons namespace but maybe in the usertalk namespace, maybe on a project page about SDC, maybe in anser to a mass message by a WMF-acount, but clearly on a page that has been edited by me and by at least one (WMF)-account repeatedly, probably this year but maybe last year.