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Create a tool to allow users to remove large numbers of pages from their watchlist based on some criteria
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Description

User story: As an editor with a very large number of pages on my Watchlist, I want to remove a substantial percentage of them that I'm no longer interested in watching, so that it can be a more manageable size.

Many of Wikimedia's most active editors have developed extremely large watchlists (where 'large' means more than a few thousand pages, some as many as hundreds of thousands). It is impractical (and sometimes impossible - T41510) for these users to remove pages one-by-one to reduce the size of their watchlist back to a manageable number of pages.

One straightforward solution could be to build a simple tool that allows users to log in via OAuth and have pages removed from their watchlist according to some criteria they can set.

The tool could use the Watchlistraw API to retrieve all the pages on the user's watchlist, then go through page-by-page to see if meets the criteria they set, and remove it from their watchlist if so.

Criteria could include:

  • Pages that are deleted and haven't existed in some period of time
  • Pages the user hasn't edited in some period of time
  • Pages the user has only ever made 1 edit to, where that edit is a revert

Event Timeline

Samwalton9 renamed this task from Create a tool to allow users to un-watchlist large numbers of pages based on some criteria to Create a tool to allow users to remove large numbers of pages from their watchlist based on some criteria.Mar 26 2025, 10:10 PM
Samwalton9 updated the task description. (Show Details)

<AntiComposite> I have a lot of pages on Commons that were added to my watchlist because I made a single category change
<AntiComposite> so "all my edits to the page are tagged with HotCat" would be useful

A potential complication that occurred to me this morning - pages are always watched in pairs, the page and their talk page, and it's impossible to know which of the two (or both) a user was interested in watching. Should the criteria the tool can define be checked against both the page and its talk page?