Description

Original task description
It would be most useful to have multiple watchlists for a given user - a large list of personal favourites, smaller lists of a given subject, trouble spots, etc.

This functionality can be simulated by having multiple usernames, but it's not quick and easy to change usernames so as only to edit with the main username.

Merged task description from T182297

From that idea.

Problem
At the moment, it is not possible filter pages on a watchlist by a personal key: article I'm working on now, community pages about sport, pictures that I have changed the description...

Possible solution
Have a way to tag pages added to the watchlist with some personal tags. Those tags are unique to the user and would complete other filtering options very well. Users can then filter by personal tags (and categories, namespaces type of edits... by potentially excluding them (T174349)) and save those filtered queries.

Merged task description from T160981 (which takes a different angle)

I would like to be able to bookmark articles and save them to lists based on their categories, e.g. Politics, Science, Pop Culture, etc.

From what I can tell, if you want to bookmark or watch an article, you can only put them all on the same global watchlist. It'd be really useful if users could simply have multiple watchlists and adjust preferences for them accordingly, both for editing/monitoring changes, and also just for bookmarking to easily find/share favorite articles.
Merged task description from duplicate T7875: Group similar pages in watchlist (aka multiple watchlists) (see comments, too)
This is a detailed proposal of how to implement something I call "watchlist categories" (should maybe come up with better name so it isn't confused with normal categories). The idea is to make the MediaWiki watchlist more flexible and allow users to have more than one watchlist:

By default, users only have one watchlist category called "General".
A new page is available at Special:Watchlist/categories where users can add, rename and remove watchlist categories.
When adding an article to your watchlist and you only have one watchlist category defined (default), the watched article will automatically be assigned to that one category (to the user, the watch proccess will look just like it does today).
When adding an article to your watchlist and you have defined more than one category, you'll go through an additional step. This step is a simple page of checkboxes that allows you to choose which of your watchlist categories you want the article to be assigned to (if none is chosen, the article is not watched).
The current watchlist edit page (Special:Watchlist/edit) gets an additional feature: Next to each article is a "Categories" link, that sends the user back to the pick-categories page with the checkboxes (see above).
At Special:Watchlist, besides the Namespace popup, another popup is added called "Categories" that allows you to choose which of your watchlist categories you wish to view (maybe that HTML form should be changed into GET-style so that users can bookmark specific category views). The easiest implementation is to only allow users to view one category at a time.

Merged task description from duplicate T120777: Watchlist priority options
Many veteran Wikipedians have watchlists that span thousands of articles, completely beyond the ability to effectively manage. If said Wikipedian can't edit for a certain period (say, a week), just going over the changes in the watchlist can take hours and become a chore that editors simply avoid, at the possible expense of missing vandalism and/or edits that they need to see.

There are external tools for creating and organizing watchlists in different ways, but I'd like to see many of those features built-in as part of MediaWiki. One important addition should be a tag for 'high-priority' articles, similar to how GMail has a tag for 'important' e-mail. While having multiple watchlists would support such functionality indirectly, it would be great to be able to see articles marked as 'important' inside the existing watchlist, and be able to filter them like one can now hide/show own edits, hide/show bot edits, etc.—Ynhockey (talk) 20:49, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

A tag system would also solve T6354: Add comments field to watchlist items.

Relevant Community Wishlist wishes

2024: Watchlist highlighting

2015: Watchlist priority options (33 support votes; #30 out of 107 proposals)
2016: Watchlist priorities or Multiple watchlists (47 support votes; #23 out of 265 proposals)
2021: Multiple watchlists (110 support votes; #7 out of 268 proposals)
2022: Grouping watched pages (46 support votes; #55 out of 270 proposals)

Relevant de.wiki Technical Wishes

2015: Mehrere Beobachtungslisten (Multiple watchlists) (10 votes)
2017: Beobachtungsliste mittels Kategorien oder Tags organisieren. (Organize your watchlist using categories or tags.) (15 votes)

See also:

T1352: RFC: Support for user-specific page lists
- A discussion in the related E138: Expiring watch list entries (RFC Meeting, 2016-02-03) proposed a per-item tagging system, in order to increase the flexibility of the existing single watchlist
T22444: Watchlist "Grouping" - essentially a duplicate of this and of T3710, but an old patch is attached
Crosswatch, a tool resulting from T92955: An enhanced cross-wiki watchlist as an OAuth tool
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Watchlist_wishlist (partially derived from T35888: Requesting a user-centred rethink of how watchlists work)
T5525: Cross-wiki watchlists
T182297: Provide user-curated tags on watchlist to ease user triage

Details

Reference: bz1492

Related Changes in GitLab:

Title	Reference	Author	Source Branch	Dest Branch
Bookworm images for fundraising	repos/releng/dev-images!62	ejegg	fundraising-bookworm	main
Set max_execution_timeout to 0 for fundraising images	repos/releng/dev-images!61	ejegg	executionTimeout	main
mwbot: Add Page::undo() to undo edit	repos/mwbot-rs/mwbot!55	mirrorkt	undo-fn	main

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Related Objects
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Status	Subtype	Assigned	Task
Stalled	Feature	None	T302800 Adding support for multiple watchlists in the Global Watchlist
Open	Feature	None	T3492 Enable editors to monitor edits to sets of watched pages
Resolved		Kgraessle	T390088 [SPIKE] How could we implement Watchlist categorisation, tagging, or multiple Watchlists? [16H]
Duplicate		None	T390098 [Design] Explore designs for categorising or tagging watched pages and enabling filtering on those sets of pages
Open		None	T404391 Allow editors to organize their watchlist items
Resolved		None	T404393 User testing: Testing adding and creating labels on Watchlist
Open		None	T406011 Watchlist label manager
Resolved	Feature	Samwilson	T408771 Add $wgEnableWatchlistLabels feature flag
Resolved	Feature	Samwilson	T408773 Create Special:WatchlistLabels
Resolved	Feature	Samwilson	T409142 Add functionality for adding and editing watchlist labels
Resolved		Samwilson	T408895 Watchlist label store class
Resolved	Feature	Samwilson	T408775 Add table of labels to Special:WatchlistLabels
In Progress	Feature	Samwilson	T409143 Add delete button with confirmation step
Open		tstarling	T406843 Create watchlist labels database tables
Open		None	T406840 Allow users to label watchlist items
Open		None	T411599 Add labels column in Special:EditWatchlist
In Progress		Cparle	T411596 Change Special:EditWatchlist layout to a table
Open		None	T411759 Handle submission of "assign label" modal
Open		None	T411611 Create popup for adding labels
Open		None	T411760 Handle submission of "remove labels" modal
Open		None	T411762 Create popup for removing labels
Open		None	T406214 Filter by labels on Special:Watchlist
Open		None	T408205 Display watchlist labels on watchlist page
Open		Samwilson	T408235 Display popup the first time a user visits watchlist after labels are enabled
In Progress		Cparle	T408716 Add filtering by label to watchlist page frontend
In Progress		tstarling	T408894 Watchlist label RC filtering backend

Event Timeline

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Quiddity mentioned this in T128352: RfC: Need to merge Notifications and Watchlist or lack thereof.Jul 12 2016, 9:36 PM

Quiddity mentioned this in T126641: [RFC] Devise plan for a cross-wiki watchlist back-end.Jul 12 2016, 10:45 PM

Stevietheman subscribed.Oct 19 2016, 3:46 PM

Samat subscribed.Nov 15 2016, 9:37 PM

Samat awarded a token.Nov 19 2016, 1:08 PM

Liuxinyu970226 added a project: Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016.Jan 1 2017, 3:13 AM

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Liuxinyu970226 removed a project: Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016.Jan 2 2017, 12:57 AM

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srishakatux updated the task description. (Show Details)Feb 10 2017, 11:53 PM

srishakatux added a project: Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016.

srishakatux moved this task from Backlog to Wishlist 11-30 (needs owner) on the Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016 board.

Qgil unsubscribed.Feb 15 2017, 5:29 PM

This task was proposed in the Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016 and in its current state needs owner. Wikimedia is participating in Google Summer of Code 2017 and Outreachy Round 14. To the subscribers -- would this task or a portion of it be a good fit for either of these programs? If so, would you be willing to help mentor this project? Remember, each outreach project requires a minimum of one primary mentor, and co-mentor.

Aklapper merged a task: T160981: Feature Request: Multiple Watchlists for Bookmarking Articles.Mar 21 2017, 10:10 AM

Aklapper mentioned this in T160981: Feature Request: Multiple Watchlists for Bookmarking Articles.

Aklapper added a subscriber: BaronBoehm.

BaronBoehm awarded a token.Mar 21 2017, 10:17 AM

Jdlrobson updated the task description. (Show Details)Mar 21 2017, 4:44 PM

Jdlrobson updated the task description. (Show Details)

I would be interested in doing a GSOC 2017 project for adding multiple watchlists. Any possible mentors who would be willing to mentor me?

Techman224 added a project: Possible-Tech-Projects.Mar 31 2017, 2:56 AM

@Techman129 As the deadline for GSOC is fast approaching; it might be hard to recruit mentors. You could still try your luck by asking on wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org if anyone would be interested in mentoring this project or connecting w/ mentors directly from here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Outreach_programs/Possible_mentors.

Aklapper removed a project: Possible-Tech-Projects.Mar 31 2017, 10:08 AM

Catrope mentioned this in T150419: Allow users to restrict who can send them notifications.Apr 28 2017, 9:23 PM

Capankajsmilyo subscribed.May 7 2017, 1:16 PM

Capankajsmilyo created subtask T164667: Global watchlist for all wikimedia projects.May 7 2017, 1:18 PM

Hex removed a subtask: T164667: Global watchlist for all wikimedia projects.May 7 2017, 3:12 PM

Hex updated the task description. (Show Details)

Trizek-WMF mentioned this in T182297: Provide user-curated tags on watchlist to ease user triage.Dec 7 2017, 9:46 AM

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DannyS712 changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Mar 29 2020, 9:02 PM

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Tgr mentioned this in T66090: Allow "article-linked" notifications for pages in a user defined list.Jan 7 2022, 3:14 AM

This could be built into the global watchlist (currently here).

Furthermore, I'd like to propose that one could show these Watchlists on a single page (at least depending on some settings). Some of the Watchlists could be collapsed by-default there. This would also allow setting priorities (the task was merged to here) for articles on a Watchlist. There could be an upper section at the top of the page showing the high-priority watchlisted items (ie things you'd like to get notified about immediately for all changes and would like to show at the top of the page even if the change was done more than a month ago).