Also requested at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications/Archive_6#Page_link_being_limited_to_created_articles_only
and at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Talk:Echo_%28Notifications%29/Is_it_possible_to_use_Echo_to_be_personally_notified_about.../reply_%284%29
See my replies there for details, but tl;dr, I suspect this will end up as a part of either Flow's "workflows", and/or the inevitable watchlists-overhaul.

it'd already be an improvement if it were made possible to track "article-linked" relating to one's watchlist "as is". A separately definable list of articles to be echoed would be a huge bonus, of course.

New request from a spokesperson for other users.
Have a list that you can edit would help people to choose which pages they want to watch. It can be useful to remove pages you have created and you don't want to have notifications about anymore, or to add pages you want to watch.

Would it be possible to raise priority about that task?

(From T143809: Allow people to watch/unwatch pages for link notification purposes)

At the moment, people can receive a notification for links made to pages they have created only.

Have a way to edit that list would allow people to:

• remove some links (articles they have created to help someone, articles with a lot of trafic, etc.)
• add some links to watch if a page has some trafic, or to watch to which articles it has been added ([[John Doe (writer, 1963)]] instead of [[John Doe (writer, 1965)]]).

And possibly more cases.

The most raised example for that list was the raw watchlist [[Special:EditWatchlist/raw]]

Feedback from the FR Wikiconference 2016

This would be very useful in Wikidata as new items in Wikidata usually link to others in their space and this feature allows to get notified about new items that a given user cares about.

and also remove notifications that a user doesn't car about, e.g. I want to know about new links to Q24258909 (broken rail) but I don't care about new links to Q26484625 (lap (of a circuit). The latter are far more common, but I can only choose to get both or neither currently and have no options at all about new links to Q7283877 (Rail Accident Investigation Branch), which I'd like to see, as that item was created by a bot.

In T66090#3771590, @Thryduulf wrote:

and also remove notifications that a user doesn't care about [...]

That's the matching task, T46787: Allow excluding pages from the page links notifications. I've linked it more clearly in the task description now. :)

Another request for this feature at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Help_talk:Notifications&oldid=1061647819#Notifications_for_links_to_pages_you_didn't_create

T3492: Enable editors to monitor edits to sets of watched pages is the task about having multiple watchlists. Creating a new sort-of-watchlist with very limited scope seems to me like a bad path to start down on.

I'm moving this to triaged as it's not something in the scope of the Growth team's short-to-medium term plans.

I have found https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T70060 which talks about the same or at least very similar issue as here. Maybe you know already about it, but maybe not?

Requested again at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#c-Fortek67-20260729110900-Link_notifications

I've cleaned-up and simplified the Description a bit, plus made a listing of all the prior examples of users requesting this feature (instead of just adding them as new comments).

Tagging Reader experience Team because seems to me related to reading lists feature as it behaves as a watchlist.

@Quiddity thanks so much for cleaning up and summarizing. To better triage for my own team, a clarification question: the requested feature is that for a particular user who did not create the article originally, they can "subscribe" to an article so that any time links are added to the article (and no other types of changes, like new section added or new citations added), a notification is sent to that user?

and we'd like to have all the articles that are "watched" in this way to be on a list together, but it shouldn't be a sublist type within Watchlist?

In T66090#12320657, @HFan-WMF wrote:

@Quiddity thanks so much for cleaning up and summarizing. To better triage for my own team, a clarification question: the requested feature is that for a particular user who did not create the article originally, they can "subscribe" to an article so that any time links are added to the article (and no other types of changes, like new section added or new citations added), a notification is sent to that user?

and we'd like to have all the articles that are "watched" in this way to be on a list together, but it shouldn't be a sublist type within Watchlist?

It's not about changes to the page itself. It's a feature request related to this notification: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Notifications/Types#Page_links – the creator of a page gets a notification whenever someone adds a link to that page in another article (= now there's a "connection" between article A and B that didn't exist before).
User story: I'm not the creator of the page but I'm very interested in the topic and would like to receive the same notification. I want to subscribe to this page either via watchlist / reading list or a new special page or perhaps a simple input box on Special:Preferences similar to https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Notifications#Muting_pages in order to receive these link notifications.

Thanks so much for the explanation, Johannes! @Samwalton9-WMF in reviewing this particular use case, while we might be able to build it on top of reading list functionality, the core use case seems to be more for contributors / "watch" behavior than for readers. Could this be a use case for a specific watchlist label, even? My team is not well-positioned to work on fulfilling this request.

One more gnomish use case is disambiguation pages: I get notifications when somebody links to a disambiguation page I created, so I can go and check the link and see whether it needs to be made specific. For many old disambiguation pages (that tend to attract the largest number of wrong links), the original page creator is long gone or may not be interested in this task, so it would be helpful if somebody else could "adopt" the page and receive link notifications.

Basically, page link notifications are awesome, but the list of pages I (and other people) would like to have notifications for is not a subset of the list of pages where I have the oldest edit in the page history.

In T66090#12331555, @HFan-WMF wrote:

Thanks so much for the explanation, Johannes! @Samwalton9-WMF in reviewing this particular use case, while we might be able to build it on top of reading list functionality, the core use case seems to be more for contributors / "watch" behavior than for readers. Could this be a use case for a specific watchlist label, even? My team is not well-positioned to work on fulfilling this request.

A good question. It's hard to say exactly where this feature should sit, but it does seem redundant to build yet another place where a list of articles can be managed.