Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Wikipedia’s Standard Watchlist

If you want to keep an eye on a limited number of articles and other pages (say a hundred or so), then the watchlist that Wikipedia provides each registered editor probably meets all your needs. Most active editors use this watchlist. You simply tell Wikipedia you want to monitor selected pages—articles, user talk pages, whatever. Then you run a report whenever you want to see if anyone has edited those pages since your last report.

Note

In Wikipedia, the term watchlist sometimes refers to the list of pages you’ve told Wikipedia you want to watch, and sometimes to the report that Wikipedia generates when you click the “my watchlist” link in your screen’s upper right. For clarity, in this chapter “watchlist” refers to the list of watched pages, and “watchlist report” is what you get when you click the “my watchlist” link.

The Standard Watchlist Report

Wikipedia offers you three different watchlist reports: standard, expanded, and enhanced. The expanded and enhanced reports build on the standard report. But if you’re like many editors, the standard watchlist report (Figure 6-2) may meet all your monitoring needs. You get to it by clicking “my watchlist” (one of the six standard links in the screen’s upper right corner, when you’re logged on).

Figure 6-2. The standard watchlist report starts out in the “Display watched changes” view shown here. The number of ...