Last modified: 2014-01-07 04:23:22 UTC
Please install the PovWatch extension (documented at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PovWatch) on the English Wikipedia. There is consensus for this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29#PovWatch.
Permalink: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=312263639#PovWatch
Users at the proposal page expressed interest in the ability to remove pages from users' watchlists once disruption has died down. Some users also said they would appreciate pages added to their watchlists via the extension being highlighted or distinguished in some other way from other pages on their watchlists.
Changed Keywords: Shell → Shell, need-review That extension is currently not used on any WMF wiki by the looks so it will need to be reviewed by a developer.
Well, Tim Starling wrote it, so I imagine he will just have to review his own code; that shouldn't take too long. It was installed on the test wiki when I filed the bug.
There are a number of problems I can see with this as it stands: * Sysop-only. Yet another thing us mere mortals "don't need" to see. Yeah, we get it, you're either an administrator or a vandal. Enough of that fucking bullshit already. * Impossible to remove titles once added. Eventually subscribers will get all sorts of junk because of edit wars three years ago. * No way to distinguish titles added by this extension from titles not added by this extension. Combined with the above means anyone using this is just asking for their watchlist to become unmanageable. Looking at the "discussion" that showed "consensus" for this, I just see a lot of people writing '''Support''' based on someone elses' (poor) description of what the extension does, without having the slightest clue about any of the above problems.
I'm going to go ahead and close this as LATER for now. PovWatch has been disabled on test.wikipedia.org for a few months (cf. http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/index.php?diff=22085&oldid=22084 ), making it (as noted on this bug) not used on any WMF wikis. From #wikimedia-tech in September 2009: <Annemarie> TimStarling: Why did you disable PovWatch on test.wikipedia?</message> <TimStarling> because I was surprised it was still enabled, it was meant to be a trial <TimStarling> I'm not sure if it works anymore <TimStarling> nobody has used it since it was written, 2 years ago It's unmaintained and not fit to be used in its current state (see bug 20523#c5 for various reasons). If a newer extension is written or PovWatch is cleaned up, this bug can be re-opened. But there really isn't any hope for this being enabled anytime soon.
I have made a request for common watchlists, watchlists globally maintained to which users can 'subscribe', see bug 21223.
Moving to WONTFIX: the community consensus of 2009 is no longer applicable today.
