Last modified: 2013-06-12 23:18:21 UTC
English Wiktionary has a high ratio or article to patrolers, a problem possibly shared with other Wiktionaries. Regular contributors alleviate the burden on patrolers by watching articles they edit. If they do so by default, their total pages watched can exceed 22K, which seems to be a point at which most users experience timeout on trying to load even the raw watchlist. A user recently reported having more than 150K items on his watchlist, another 55K. I exceeded 24K, before resorting to drastic measures to bring the total down. Would it be possible to allow the watchlist to be exported for offline revision and then for the revised version to be imported? I could understand the need for some kind of hard limit on the size of such imports or on the total number of pages watched to prevent abuse of importing.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 39510 ***
I have commented at [[https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39510]]. I think the problem is that the presentation of large watchlists does not facilitate effective revision of the watchlist. Date order would be handy for some purposes, character range in pagename is useful for others, as well as the existing order: alphabetical withing each namespace. It is not merely a technical timeout problem as that bug would lead one to believe.
