Last modified: 2014-11-09 22:12:46 UTC

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Bug 470 - Provide a 'user-watchlist' that lists all recent contributions of a set of users
Provide a 'user-watchlist' that lists all recent contributions of a set of users
Status: NEW
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Watchlist (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Low enhancement with 26 votes (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
: 4614 16402 42415 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: 31105
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2004-09-13 06:43 UTC by SJ
Modified: 2014-11-09 22:12 UTC (History)
19 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description SJ 2004-09-13 06:43:36 UTC
Add a tab when viewing a user/user-talk page to "watch this user", and a
separate user-watchlist special page which lists the latest contributions from
users on the list.
Comment 1 Rob Church 2005-10-09 16:35:15 UTC
Could you not just create a page containing links to those users' contributions,
and check them regularly? I can see how this feature might be useful for
mentoring other users, however.
Comment 2 Rob Church 2006-04-04 15:31:54 UTC
*** Bug 4614 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 3 Guillaume Paumier 2006-05-28 08:32:57 UTC
This functionnality would also be useful to follow IPs going on vandalizing
after their block ends.
Comment 4 SJ 2008-01-30 06:34:25 UTC
To Rob:
 Could you not just create a page containing links to those users' contributions,
 and check them regularly? I can see how this feature might be useful for
 mentoring other users, however.

One could say the same thing about articles; which is what was done before watchlists came about: you listed all the articles you wanted to watch, and linked to them or their hsitory pages, and went to visit those pages one by one.  A watchlist offers much more than a minor increase in efficiency; it allows a quick check on many sparse events, and allows you to get things such as email-on-new-edit for free -- something just as useful for a group of users as for a group of pages.
Comment 5 Siebrand Mazeland 2009-02-02 11:45:44 UTC
Changed component to "Watchlist"
Comment 6 Mike.lifeguard 2009-03-07 05:07:01 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> This functionnality would also be useful to follow IPs going on vandalizing
> after their block ends.

Currently we use IRC tools to do this - but of course that is in realtime, and is therefore inferior in some ways, and superior in others. This is definitely a desired feature.
Comment 7 SJ 2009-04-18 21:13:46 UTC
Watching #cvn-unifications today I noticed what looks like an sr: bot making its way (without editing) through every known wiki.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralAuth/Шешељевац

I wanted a cross-wiki version of this watchlist feature.   (I'm sure crosswiki watchlists for pages would also be handy)  One way to do this is to have 'watchlist this user' turn into graylisting them for rc and edit monitoring tools.  
But I would also certainly like the wiki-page version of same; I may just be interested in seeing how this bot works, and how its algorithms are updated, something much easier to see when viewing all edits by date across many sparsely-edited wikis.

As an aside, it would be nice to have more than one level of 'enhancement' in describing bug severity, since I have filed a number of enhancements which are just nice-to-haves, and this is something I want with much more practical interest.
Comment 8 Chad H. 2009-07-16 17:43:03 UTC
*** Bug 16402 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 9 Church of emacs 2010-08-24 19:30:09 UTC
Well, this seems like a nice-to-have feature! It looks doable to me, I wonder if it is harder that I'm thinking it is, because no one implemented it yet.

The watchlist table has to be expanded by a boolean (or rather tinyint(1)) wl_userwatch with default 0. Alternatively one could define ns: -2 as "user watchlist" in the wl_namespace field.
Other than that, when looking up the user watchlist, the software has to check for rc_user_text instead of rc_title in the recentchanges table. (One could also store the userid, but that would not work for logged-out-users).

I guess a separate watchlist (e.g. Special:Userwatchlist) is preferred to incorporating it with the usual watchlist (correct me if I'm wrong).
Comment 10 Thorncrag 2010-10-04 20:21:14 UTC
Why not just have the watched user's contributions appear in one's watchlist? That would (I presume) be a simpler implementation.
Comment 11 Church of emacs 2010-10-04 21:49:25 UTC
I'm not sure about the implementation, it depends on whether you can put it in one query. That's open to the guy who implements it :)
Comment 12 Krinkle 2010-10-04 21:57:18 UTC
I would prefer to have page-watching and user-watching seperate as they are, atleast for me, a different task. I'd be in a different frame of mind when working through either list.

However, if there are usecases to  have both mixed into 1 list (ie. is there an advantage for having them mixed ?)
Comment 13 Chad H. 2010-10-04 22:04:17 UTC
(In reply to comment #9)
> The watchlist table has to be expanded by a boolean (or rather tinyint(1))
> wl_userwatch with default 0. Alternatively one could define ns: -2 as "user
> watchlist" in the wl_namespace field.

-2 is NS_MEDIA. You shouldn't use negative namespace numbers, they're reserved for "special" namespaces.
Comment 14 Rd232 2012-05-12 16:54:53 UTC
There was a recent discussion at English Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28proposals%29/Archive_86#Allow_watchlisting_of_Special:Contributions.2FUser_pages which (despite some opposition) overall supports this request, and led to the creation of a toolserver prototype. So "ping" to anyone watching this!
Comment 15 matanya 2012-07-26 09:09:33 UTC
Link to the tool: 

https://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/
Comment 16 Andre Klapper 2012-11-26 17:16:33 UTC
*** Bug 42415 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 17 Technical 13 2013-04-18 12:06:28 UTC
(In reply to comment #15)
> Link to the tool: 
> 
> https://toolserver.org/~dcoetzee/followedusers/

Unfortunately toolserver has become increasingly less reliable lately and I've read talks of discontinuing it.  Is there a replacement for this tool in the works for those that are interested in it?  I personally wouldn't want to monitor another users contributions list because quite frankly, it would be inefficient as you would be spending all of your time watching other users trying to clean up after them instead of contributing to a wiki.  Cleaning up after others is what bots should be for.
Comment 18 Oona Castro 2014-11-09 22:12:46 UTC
Hi there! Is there any update on this tool?

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