Wikipedia talk:Global, cross-wiki, integrated or stacked watchlists

Existing tools

Luxo's gWatch: unified watchlist covering all Wikimedia Foundation projects.

Thanks, User:Paradoctor, for adding that link to the page. I tried it out by entering my watchlists for smaller wikis outside Wikipedia and the Commons.

I then tried out the integrated watchlist and noticed a new message on an article talk page on Wikiversity. Normally, I rarely check watchlists for smaller wikis unless I am in current discussions.

I wonder if this integrated watchlist could be implemented in MediaWiki. --Timeshifter (talk) 20:13, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Can't speak for our greasemonkeys, but I see no reason why not. It's a simple matter of adding to Special:Watchlist some code that queries the other wiki's XML APIs. You can submit a request on bugzilla, but I think your first stop should be a discussion at Wikipedia:Village Pump (technical). If the powers that be dissent, it is always possible to implement this as an ECMAscript, I don't know who you could ask, though. Paradoctor (talk) 22:03, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Afterthought: I think I could cobble together a custom script that would automatically upgrade your Mediawiki watchlist with gWatch content. That would be just a kludge, but it should be usable. Paradoctor (talk) 22:06, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I am not knowledgeable in any of the technicalities though. It might be better if you could start a discussion at Wikipedia:Village Pump (technical). I would join in if notified here or on my talk page about the discussion. If notified here, then others would learn more too. They might join in the discussion. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:40, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the vote of confidence, but it is not really important to me, I just use bookmarks. You proposal would be an improvement, though. I'd say be WP:BOLD and bring it up yourself, you might be surprised at what happens. ;) Paradoctor (talk) 09:08, 21 March 2010 (UTC)

This is probably one of the most important enhancements to make. Tisane (talk) 00:29, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Discussions

I brought it up for discussion here:

• Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive 1#Integrated watchlists --Timeshifter (talk) 01:24, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be any opposition to this idea, so it should probably be implemented. I have a couple projects I need to do first, but then this can be worked on. Probably I'll create an SVN branch of CentralAuth and then when it passes code review, merge it into the trunk. Tisane (talk) 17:20, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Good. I am clueless about MediaWiki coding. --Timeshifter (talk) 18:52, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, I don't know exactly how I'm going to implement this either, but I'm going to keep researching and trying different stuff until I figure it out. It's important not only for meta and the content wikis, but for MediaWiki.org; for that reason, the devs should be pretty amenable to this idea. Tisane (talk) 23:11, 23 May 2010 (UTC)

I'm starting to wonder if a CentralAuth enhancement is the best approach. See Wikipedia:Village_pump_(idea_lab)#Why_does_Wikimedia_need_more_than_one_MediaWiki_installation.3F. I may develop an extension to implement the alternative approach mentioned in that thread. While I can't guarantee that Wikimedia will be receptive to it, I think it's a potentially more elegant approach, and perhaps easier to implement. (Sometimes it is easier to reinvent the wheel rather than come up with some hacky way to tweak an existing system to do something it wasn't designed to do, namely, integrate across wikis.) Tisane (talk) 13:49, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

This user supports global, cross-wiki, integrated watchlists.

Userbox and another discussion:

• Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 63#Integrated watchlists --Timeshifter (talk) 15:49, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Do you really think users will be interested in having more than one watchlist?

The proposal states that users might want to create more than one watchlist. E.g., Watchlist A might watch enwiki, meta and commons; Watchlist B might watch enwiki, frwiki, eswiki, etc. But I wonder whether people will really use that functionality. We allow people to pick what namespaces they want to search (using checkboxes in Special:Preferences) but I haven't seen any requests for multiple search configurations. I think it might suffice to simply have one global watchlist per user, with checkboxes in Preferences to select what wikis should show up on the global watchlist. Of course, edits to watched pages from whatever wiki is local will always appear on the watchlist.

I just don't like to create complexity when it isn't needed. Not only is it easier on the programmers to reduce unneeded complexity, but I think the users appreciate it too. Preferences in particular needs to be kept fairly simple. If a default will serve almost everyone's needs, we should just go with the default and leave it out of Preferences. Tisane (talk) 18:47, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

I think the default should be all watchlists combined. That would really help all the other projects fast. Maybe down the line preferences can be added for more complex combinations of watchlists. I would set my preferences to keep the Commons watchlist separate. All the rest of the watchlists for other projects could be integrated into my Wikipedia watchlist. --Timeshifter (talk) 03:47, 1 June 2010 (UTC)

Implementation details

I have begun work implementing the integrated watchlist. Would anyone care to suggest some details as to how the user interface should work? It doesn't seem all that feasible to have hundreds of checkboxes (one for each Wikimedia wiki) in one's preferences, so that users can pick and choose which wikis to integrate. So I think what will happen is that we will have Special:Watchlist and Special:InterwikiWatchlist, with two separate buttons for easy access ("my interwiki watchlist" next to "my watchlist"), or perhaps it will be a single checkbox in preferences. Or maybe the button to access your integrated watchlist will be available on your regular watchlist, and vice versa, so that you can easily access one from the other. Or it could be combination of these different methods. Any suggestions on how the user interface should work will be appreciated. Thanks.

By the way, I chose to call it Special:InterwikiWatchlist rather than Special:IntegratedWatchlist because someone complained that "integrated" isn't specific enough. On the other hand, "interwikially integrated," while more precise, is too long.Tisane ^talk/_stalk 20:16, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

They all sound like good ideas. Not exactly sure I am visualizing what you are describing though. I guess every wiki will still have Special:Watchlist. And then there will be another watchlist, Special:InterwikiWatchlist, for all the other wikis? --Timeshifter (talk) 03:17, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

That's basically what I have in mind. But, presumably people don't feel like typing in "Special:InterwikiWatchlist" so there will need to be some kind of shortcut. I think what will happen is that I will get a proof of concept committed to the SVN, and then solicit suggestions from the other devs, or they will come forward on their own initiative with suggestions, as happened with mw:Extension:PureWikiDeletion. That was a pretty good collaboration. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 03:29, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Unfiltered brainstorming (so forgive me if it is unrealistic): I picture every wiki having a single Special:Watchlist page with two sections: local, which corresponds to what already exists in local wikis, and global, which is a transclusion of Special:InterwikiWatchlist. As for enabling/disabling specific wikis in the integrated watchlist (which could be handy for users to filter the changes even if not strictly necessary) a natural interface would be some Special:MetaWatchlist which would be configured like the regular watchlists (either as a list of links or as checkboxes) but that enabled wikis instead of articles. --Duplode (talk) 04:51, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I think the need for checkboxes is probably overrated when it comes to watchlisting. We have checkboxes for namespaces to be searched, because it makes sense there. There are only a few dozen namespaces at most, so the number of checkboxes isn't too overwhelming to deal with, and some namespaces (e.g. MediaWiki) most users will have no need to see in their search results. Unless those namespaces are unchecked, though, their pages will show up in searches.

With watchlisting, it's a bit different. Not only are there a heck of a lot of wikis (thus creating a multitude of checkboxes), but the only pages that are going to appear on users' watchlists anyway are those that they've specifically expressed an interest in by hitting the Watch button. On the other hand, if a user has no interest in, say, the Swahili Wikipedia, it's not going to show up on his watchlist because he won't have watched any of those Swahili pages. So the problem takes care of itself.

One might say, "What if a user has uploaded 10,000 images to the Commons? His watchlist could get flooded by all the changes." But in truth, there probably won't be a lot of edits to those pages. If there are a lot of changes, they're probably done by bots, and bot edits can be filtered out of the watchlist easily. And the users who are uploading that many images are probably tech-savvy enough to be able to get their watchlist results by API and use various parameters to filter out whatever they want. Another solution is to simply maintain two accounts, one to do mass edits/uploads and another to do regular editing. Each account can have its own watchlists.

I think user interest in pages is boolean. A user either has enough time/interest to watch a page, or he doesn't. It doesn't make it more manageable to split the list up into more than one or two watchlists; that just makes it harder to manage, not easier. We'll need to keep local watchlists just for the seek of providing backward compatibility and appeasing those users who will respond to the proposal by saying "OMG you're proposing a CHANGE to something!" But there's no need to create a spectrum of intermediate options between local and global.

It should be possible to create and edit a raw list of watched pages on all wikis, though. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 18:30, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Wikia and other MediaWiki implementations

Other MediaWiki installations will probably make use of this too. I am a volunteer admin at one of the many Wikia wikis. There would be a lot more cross-wiki editing between the thousands of Wikia wikis in my opinion if there were an interwiki watchlist.

Wikia already has unified login. So I can easily edit on any Wikia wiki. The problem is that I can't then easily watch the pages I have edited if they are on more than one wiki.

I am not talking about watchlists crossing between Wikipedia and Wikia. That would be interesting, too. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:58, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

We can probably integrate Wikipedia and Wikia watchlists, if Wikia has the will to do it. But I doubt they have the strategic vision to see the advantages. Implementing it would probably use a similar concept as what makes mw:Extension:RPED work.

I don't know too much about the specifics of Wikia's configuration, but mw:Extension:InterwikiIntegration will first be designed to work on simple wiki farms that share user tables, and then it will be designed to run on wikis that run CentralAuth. That is going to be a pain to implement, I can tell already. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 20:10, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

I left a link pointing here from this Wikia central forum discussion:

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Forum%3AIntegrated_watchlists

The pages linked below do not list CentralAuth. I searched for "CentralAuth". Does this mean Wikia is not using CentralAuth?

http://community.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Version

http://wikia.com/wiki/Special:Version

Maybe if some other site using MediaWiki (without CentralAuth) implements integrated, interwiki watchlists without problems, then other MediaWiki-using sites might try it. --Timeshifter (talk) 19:06, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, that is kinda similar to the plan for rolling out PureWikiDeletion; it's going to be tried on non-Wikimedia wikis, and then perhaps a small Wikimedia project, and then maybe larger Wikimedia projects. I don't think CentralAuth is used on very many non-Wikimedia wikis. If you don't see it listed in Special:Version, then it's probably not used by Wikia. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 03:53, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Version lists CentralAuth as "Central Auth" (with a space). I searched the Wikia version pages again and did not find "Central Auth" listed on them. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:48, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

I know nothing about Wikia's configuration, so it's hard for me to say anything definitive. I think they are in general less open about their information than Wikimedia, which is one of the reasons I don't know a whole lot about them. Anyhoo, I will design this extension to work on systems with shared user tables and systems with global user tables. That should cover everything. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 09:10, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. If a big wiki farm like Wikia with its large number of registered users (over 2 million) tries out integrated, interwiki watchlists, then I think that its success there will encourage Wikipedia/Wikimedia to try out interwiki watchlists. The people that started Wikia also helped start Wikipedia, and many people at Wikia also help out at Wikipedia. Special:Statistics at each Wikia wiki lists the same total number (over 2 million) of registered users. Some examples at Wikia:

http://www.wikia.com/Special:Statistics

http://cannabis.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics

http://green.wikia.com/wiki/Special:Statistics

http://www.wowwiki.com/Special:Statistics

Wikipedia gives a different total of registered users depending on the language of the Wikipedia site:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics - over 12 million.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics - around 900,000.

Commons:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics - 1.2 million.

Wikibooks: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Special:Statistics - 400,000.

Wikiversity: http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Special:Statistics - 200,000.

--Timeshifter (talk) 05:54, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Implementation, cont'd

For more info, see mw:Extension_talk:InterwikiIntegration#Implementing_Special:InterwikiRecentChanges_and_Special:InterwikiWatchlist. Basically, there is a massive (well, not massive, but bigger than anything I've ever dealt with) codebase consisting of several classes together encompassing several thousand lines of code, that implements the watchlist and recentchanges. (The watchlist and recentchanges are closely tied together, so implementing the interwiki watchlist basically requires implementing most of the interwiki recentchanges functionality). I'll fool with this for a few days more, but if I don't make much progress, I may just abandon it and move on to other projects. All I ever committed to do was attempt to implement this. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 02:08, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, I'm making significant progress now. It looks like I will also need an interwiki (global) page table in order to get this to work. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 06:32, 17 June 2010 (UTC)

Logs and contributions, etc.

Implementation of this feature continues. What about logs? Sometimes on the watchlist, an entry like this will appear:

04:20 	(Move log) . . Tisane  (Talk | contribs | block) moved Wikiquote:Cannabis to Wikiquote:Cannabis sativa

What do you want "(Move log)" to link to? An interwiki move log, or to the move log on wikiquote? I guess it makes the most sense to link to the wikiquote move log. I also presume that you'll want talk, contribs and block to link to the appropriate pages on wikiquote, rather than providing an interwiki contribs or a global block. By the way, the format of watchlist items currently works as follows:

04:20 	 Wikiquote:Help:Foo (diff | hist) . . (+3)  . . Tisane  (Talk | contribs | block)

Thus, it's Wiki:Namespace:Title, and is sorted in reverse chronological order (much like our current watchlist), rather than being sorted by wiki or anything like that. I figure, sorting it by time is the easiest for people's minds to process; if people want to segregate results by wiki, they can go to their regular watchlists on the appropriate wikis. Did you want some other format? If so, please provide a sample of what you want it to look like. Thanks, Tisane ^talk/_stalk 04:44, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I agree with all your above choices. Separating the watchlist into sections by wiki would make it a lot slower to scan. Especially, as one edits more and more wikis, and thus more and more wikis are added into the interwiki watchlist. Reverse chronological order is good too, since that is the same format as the regular Wikipedia watchlist. So the interwiki watchlist will be just as easy, intuitive, and fast to scan as the regular Wikipedia watchlist.

I agree with linking to the specific wikis for logs, talk, contribs, blocks, etc.. --Timeshifter (talk) 13:35, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I created a proof of concept that is partly functional (i.e. it provides interwiki edit entries similar to the above, but some of the links for user, user talk, moved-to page, etc. don't link interwiki yet). But the way I've been working on this — i.e., using mw:Extension:InterwikiExtension — isn't the best way. Some of the interwiki functionality simply needs to be moved into the core if we're going to have a solution that is elegant. So, I'm considering creating an SVN branch of the core that will fulfill some of the items on this to do list, and then merging that into the core. That should cut out most of the unnecessary duplication of core code that presently exists in the extension. Basically, the interwiki table sometimes contains two or more prefixes leading to the same wiki, and therefore I think we may as well break off all that duplicate data into its own "wiki" database table, and also add some wiki id fields in certain major tables (e.g. the recentchanges table and watchlist table), add wiki id variables to certain major classes, and modify functions in Linker.php, RecentChange.php, ChangesList.php, etc. to use those variables if necessary. It's a big overhaul.

I'm just not sure whether the rest of the MediaWiki community will go along with my ideas; the responses on wikitech-l haven't been all that encouraging. There is an ongoing project that proposes a different approach, and people seem to want to throw everything in the interwiki table, which I guess is workable but not necessarily ideal. Basically, I'm reluctant to do a whole lot with this until (1) I finish with some other, more pressing projects or (2) it becomes evident that the Wikimedia community is interested in an interwiki watchlist, enough that if I create a branch revamping MediaWiki to support interwiki stuff, they'll allow it to be merged in. OK, the bug does have 20 votes, but this is still a major change, depending on how one wants to approach implementing it. Plus people don't seem all that patient with new devs fooling around with stuff; they expect people to know what they're doing, figure it out for themselves and not make mistakes, which isn't all that realistic IMHO. It may be that once I have a working branch, and it's not just an abstract concept, that will cut down on the possibility of misunderstandings as to what I'm proposing arising, and support will materialize, but maybe not; who knows. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 23:08, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

I think the Wikimedia Foundation should ease out most of the paid non-technical staff (with good severance packages, of course), and hire more developers. But what do I know. :)

I looked at mw:User:Peter17/Reasonably_efficient_interwiki_transclusion a little. There is a great need for integration in many areas. I had to create image license templates for the Wikia wiki where I am an admin. Fortunately, I did not also have to create all the help pages. Those are now transluded (and can be customized) from here:

http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Contents - see it transcluded to various wikis:

http://green.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Contents

http://recipes.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Contents

You may not be able to create integrated watchlists. But you can provide input, and over time it will probably get done somehow. I have been helping along the momentum for optional ads for years. As have many other people. Over time there seems to be less and less opposition to it. I supported GIF scaling for years, and it has been returned. It took many people building up support for it to finally get it done. --Timeshifter (talk) 09:51, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Probably what I will end up doing is creating the SVN branch, and then the outcome of the merge proposal will determine how my work on the extension proceeds. Then it is just a matter of lobbying for it to be installed on WP. It should be noted, though, that there are other highly useful extensions (Semantic MediaWiki being a prime example) that haven't been installed.on WP. I would tend to agree that WMF seems to have some superfluous staff. Maybe you should run for board member on the platform of making that personnel change you mention above! Heck, we should both run on that platform. There are probably a lot of other places fat could be trimmed as well. E.g., we should quit sending people traveling everywhere, and just have online meetings. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 16:05, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Name

Why not just call it "interwiki watchlists" or "global watchlists"? "Integrated" is implied. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 20:38, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Interwiki can be a geeky Wikipedia word that many users may not understand. "Global" watchlists sometimes gets confused with global login. So I put all the words in the title. We got room. --Timeshifter (talk) 23:23, 8 July 2010 (UTC)

Inclupedia

I think that an integrated watchlist would come in most handy over at Inclupedia, since it would be partly a mirror of Wikipedia, and Wikipedia would be edited from Inclupedia. Tisane ^talk/_stalk 03:02, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

Interwiki watchlist script

Here. --Yair rand (talk) 21:19, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I left a message here: User talk:Yair rand/interwikiwatchlist.js --Timeshifter (talk) 11:02, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks (again) for this, Yair! – SJ + 16:20, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

Related changes and categories

Hello everyone! I wanted to propose an extension to the recent changes feature when applied to categories: rather than just showing the changes in pages included in the category, an option could be activated to show changes to the pages included in descendent categories. So if I visit the recent changes of Category:Japanese music, I could see changes to pages on Music festivals in Japan‎, Japanese musicians‎ and Japanese musical instruments‎. This would be extremely helpful for people interested in particular areas of interest, like Wikiproject members. Can you contact people who can implement this? Thanks! --NaBUru38 (talk) 23:00, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Japanese_music. It's in the sidebar, right above "Upload file". --Yair rand (talk) 00:38, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

That link only shows changes to pages linked directly to Category:Japanese music. What I want is changes in those pages, but also the pages linked to descendent categories of Category:Japanese music (like Category:Music festivals in Japan‎, Category:Japanese musicians‎ and Category:Japanese musical instruments‎), all in one single list. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:03, 28 March 2012 (UTC)

crosswatch – looking for users to test it

Example screenshot

Hey, I'm developing toollabs:crosswatch – a cross-wiki watchlist tool which uses OAuth – and looking for users to test it. It is now in a somewhat stable and usable state, but I'm sure there are a few bugs somewhere. I will add more functionality in the future, like crosswiki notifications and the ability to show diffs. See phab:T92955 for a more detailed plan.

@Timeshifter: as you seem to be one of the driving forces behind this page I'm pinging you directly. --Sitic (talk) 16:04, 25 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the work! I left some notes on the talk page there: meta:Talk:Crosswatch. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:02, 26 June 2015 (UTC)

Smart Watchlist, CrossWatch

The Smart Watchlist tool completely broke this morning, probably due to changes in the watchlist format. It was only half-working for the last few months. Now it is totally gone. I can't function without it. Any help anybody? Cheers, Kautilya3 (talk) 11:54, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

I am not familiar with the Smart Watchlist. Please link to it. --Timeshifter (talk) 21:11, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

As of now, the link toollabs:crosswatch is dead. As it's at the top of the page, remove until repaired? Barte (talk) 20:13, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

Barte, it works now. --Aschroet (talk) 20:02, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

The tool went down and (T144083) was started in August 2016. --Timeshifter (talk) 14:47, 9 November 2018 (UTC)

@Kautilya3, Barte, and Timeshifter: Hi everyone. I made a proposal to fix the tool in the Community Wishlist Survey 2019. Your votes will be helpful in making sure it gets worked on. Thank you. -- Niharika (talk) 22:03, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Declined

The cross-wiki watchlist wish is now marked as Declined. What happened? ~★ nmaia ^d 18:47, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

Can you link to this? I don't keep up with this issue much, and so I don't know where you are reading this. --Timeshifter (talk) 07:24, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

@Timeshifter: See https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=2015_Community_Wishlist_Survey%2FResults&type=revision&diff=17882895&oldid=17360125. Maybe @TBolliger (WMF) knows more? ~★ nmaia ^d 13:16, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

@NMaia: The WMF's Community Tech team will not be working on this project, so we have marked it as declined. It's too large of a scope for our team to take on in addition to the other ad-hoc projects (e.g. ACTRIAL) and projects on the Wishlist. It's still a totally valid idea and the tasks are still open on Phabricator under phab:T5525 — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager (t) 16:48, 20 April 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification! Too bad it didn't work out. ~★ nmaia ^d 02:12, 21 April 2018 (UTC)

@TBolliger (WMF): Thanks both of you for the info about the current status. Does "the tasks are still open" mean that developers other than the WMF Community Tech team (I assume these are all paid staff?) are encouraged to work on it? --Timeshifter (talk) 13:51, 22 April 2018 (UTC)

@Timeshifter: Yes, correct on all counts. This means perhaps another WMF or WMDE staff member or team or a volunteer developer. — Trevor Bolliger, WMF Product Manager (t) 05:48, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

@TBolliger (WMF): OK. I updated the status cell here:

meta:2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Results --Timeshifter (talk) 22:11, 23 April 2018 (UTC)

(unindent). nmaia and TBolliger. Please add your support votes to meta:Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Watchlists/Revive Crosswatch tool. --Timeshifter (talk) 11:33, 18 November 2018 (UTC)