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Allow to mark Structured Data on Commons edits as minor
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Description

It is my understanding that there is currently no way for StructuredDataOnCommons edits to be marked as minor.

There is currently friction on Wikimedia Commons, where a tool for adding Structured Data claims gets more traction and some users have their watchlist flooded with tool-assisted edits. Some users feel that these edits should be marked as minor, which could make them easier to filter out in the watchlist.

There is not necessarily consensus that these particular tool-assisted edits should always be marked as minor, or that they should be mark-able as minor. However, this is a conversation that the community cannot really have, since there would be no technical way to implement it at the moment.

(Also, the particular problem described above could arguably be better addressed with T174349: Allow tag filter on Special:RecentChanges and Watchlist to be inverted (enable the not operator) ; but nevertheless the general point has merits and has wider application than just the particular tool being discuss)

As this is done (if I’m not mistaken) via wbsetclaim, this somewhat relates to T52933: api module wbsetclaim doesn't accept the bot param.

(Feel free to rename this task to be more general, as I suppose it’s not about Commons in particular)

(I would have thought there was already a task for this, but could not find any − please merge if I missed it)

Event Timeline

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Another parameter from action=edit which the Wikibase APIs don’t have is watchlist (nochange, preferences, unwatch, watch). Something like this parameter would probably be required to resolve the issue of QuickStatements watchlisting created/edited items – I haven’t seen anyone call for a new API parameter yet, but I assume that’s how @matej_suchanek’s comment that “each tool should give users ability to control the watchlist” would be implemented.

I would really like to see this implemented. Multiple times, different Commons editors have approached me to ask for a way to avoid cluttering their watchlists. This is because I can make tens of thousands of edits for a single user. Basically, this means their watchlist becomes useless while I am editing their images (I have been making more than 100,000 edits per month for more than two years). Any method to mark my edits as minor—for example, by adding a preference to "mark all my edits as minor"—would be a huge help for Commons image uploaders.

Support for just the reason PMG stated 7 Aug 2025.

The minor edit flag should reflect the significance of an edit. Not whether it was done to one or thousands of pages.

For mass-editing, MediaWiki has supported the bot flag for years (it works for Wikidata, and it should work for SDC, too). Bot edits are implicitly hidden from watchlists and recent changes.

But MediaWiki still sends emails about such edits of pages from watchlist.