Last modified: 2009-07-06 01:37:22 UTC
Mediawiki should have a way to watch a single section of a large article. For talk pages and pages like Wikipedia's Village Pump and Reference Desk, it's often the case that a user only cares about a single section. Trying to keep up with that section by watching the entire page is impractical, as a large number of edits may be made to the page in other sections, which the user doesn't care about. This creates both false positives (as the user investigates a change only to find it wasn't to his section) and false negatives (as the user doesn't notice a change to his section due to another edit shortly after). Additionally the time between addition and archiving on some of these pages may be low enough that the user returns in a few days to see if there are any responses, only to have lost the section to the archiving system. It would therefore be optimal to have moved sections retain the list of users watching them, or failing that, for the user to be able to quickly determine who removed a section and navigate to that point in their edit history, since the addition to the archive should be nearby. The first method would probably require adding a move section feature, while the second is just a slight expansion of the watchlist (and possibly the user contributions), provided that the user was able to watch a section and not the entire article.
Not possible with the current database infrastructure; would require new columns to be added to recentchanges, watchlist, and possibly revision, not to mention treating sections with more significance than we currently do. Precedent of other bugs, e.g. bug 8955 indicates we may not want to afford sections this significance.
These problems are basically the ones that LiquidThreads (bug 1234) addresses. Section watching is not a good solution to the essential problem that sections are not a good way to represent threads of discussion.
I agree with Simetrical's assessment. Marking this as a duplicate of #1234. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 1234 ***
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 738 ***