There are many discussion pages using transclusions (such as RfA or RfCU). Current system cannot watch the threads effectly when the discussion pages uses transcluded threads. Adding cascade-setting will make the watchlist more effective. Best regards.
Version: 1.22.0
Severity: enhancement
Thanks for taking the time to report this!
(In reply to comment #0)
There are many discussion pages using transclusions (such as RfA or RfCU).
This refers to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RfA I assume.
Where exactly would you expect such a setting to be available?
I meant, cascade-watch feature to be general feature, not limited to some pages on specific wikis. Many discussion sites uses the transcluded threads such as Wikipedia RfA/RfCU, DR at Commons, almost all types of community discussion pages in ko.wp
I'm thinking about configuring Watchlist raw edit interface by adding "[cascade]" to enable cascade-watching. It should not confuses the watchlist system because the page names do not allow "[]" brackets.
This "cascade-watching" feature would also help with mainspace articles that transclude content from other pages, a practice that is gaining momentum (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_with_excerpts). One concern about this practice, especially when used on Featured and Good articles, is that watchers of the main article are not notified of changes to transcluded content.
I hope this task can be prioritised. It would help acceptance of the still under-used "excerpt" feature, particularly in featured articles. So far editors of featured articles don't like excerpts to be included as they wouldn't get notified of changes to the transcluded article unless they manually put it on their watchlist. Excerpts are an amazing tool and I see a big role for them for certain types of articles, for example those in the climate change field but also environmental pollution, many sciences and so forth. Wherever data is changing over time and would have to be manually updated in several articles, an excerpt saves heaps of time and improves overall quality of several articles at once. See also discussion here. See for example WikiProject Climate Change here.
Besides RfA and RfCU (the original use cases mentioned on this task description) and mainspace pages with excerpts, other pages that would benefit from cascade-watching would be the Village Pumps of some Wikipedias, such as the French and Portuguese ones, where transcluding subpages is very common (actually, totally standard). See for example here or here. Also, having this feature available may cause other wikis to restructure their Village Pumps (or other pages) in more efficient ways, since I can easily imagine not doing such restructurings due to the lack of cascade-watching. I'm tagging the Editing Team because this task now seems to me relevant to their more general effort to improve communication within the community.
The Growth team is only providing minimal maintenance for watchlist-related functionality (ie. putting out fires), this seems like a change with limited impact (only affects a few pages with special workflows on larger wikis) while at the same time being fairly complex technically, so I don't think we have the capacity to take it on in the foreseeable future.
Also with DiscussionTools providing per-discussion-section Echo notifications, I think the watchlist is becoming less useful as a discussion tracking tool, and this use case could be better covered by something like "auto-subscribe to all new sections on the page", but that's just me guessing; people from the Editing team might have a more authoritative opinion on that.
I just proposed this task for the 2022 Community Wishlist, see https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2022/Watchlists/Cascade-watching