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Hey all --

It seems that my watchlist has been blanked. There's nothing there now. Has anyone else had this happen? Is it part of a general housecleaning effort? Thanks, Stormwriter

Mine is fine. I think the Watchlist only goes back a week now so if your watched pages haven't been edited in that time then a blank watch list would the the expected behavior. I'm pretty sure this limit on watchlists was done to reuduce server load. I, for example, am watching a couple thousand pages and it used to take 3-5 minutes to generate my watch list. -- mav 20:01 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

I find that I get logged out of Wikipedia if I don't make any edits for a while. (Not sure how long it takes, though.) Since users who aren't logged in can do most of the same stuff that logged-in users can, my watchlist going blank is usually the sign that alerts me to the fact that this has happened. Could this be it?

By the way, why does the watchlist now only go back a week? There were things further down mine that I had there because I was eventually going to get round to doing something about them, but now I can't remember what they were. :( -- Oliver Pereira 20:15 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Hey guys -- thanks for the info. I figured it out. It seems I needed to click "Show changes for the last 7 days" in order for it to open the list. It defaults to 1 day now. Stormwriter

Oh, you can change it! That's all right, then. :) Mine seems to be set to "3 days" by default, though... -- Oliver Pereira 20:33 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

Note that I'm actively working on streamlining the watchlist function to balance performance and usability, so it may change frequently over the next few hours as I put the latest goodies online. -- Brion 20:40 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

thanks very much for this, Brion :-) user:anthere

I'm grateful for any changes for the better, but is there a list of "latest goodies" anywhere or does everyone have to find out by chance, luck and intuition? KF 20:57 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

I have read many a comment posted particularly by newbies saying that Wikipedia is doomed because anyone can edit a page and create or add all kind of nonsense. I don't think this is a major problem. Rather, I believe this is one of Wikipedia's assets. KF 20:47 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)

I'm user:zanimum. My watchlist only list 5 articles now, why is that?

Read the big bold text in Wikipedia:Watchlist help. -- Brion 18:51, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

First aproach: limiting the article count

Is there any way to view the items on our watchlists to bring the total down to less than 200 articles? -- NetEsq 19:38, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

(I just bumped the limit from 200 to 500, BTW.) Not yet, but I'm messing with it still. -- Brion 19:42, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

For the too-big watchlist, it now dumps an alphabetical list of watched pages with the option to remove selected items. Primitive, but it seems to work for now. -- Brion 21:12, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks, Brion. That's just what the doctor ordered! -- NetEsq 21:17, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hey, that is the function, I was looking for!!! I wanted for months already to create a function that shows me, what I am watching. Now it is working ;-)

Please keep this function (add some button on the watch list page) so that we can manage better our "children"... (you know, how Wikipedians think about their pages... ;-) Fantasy 22:18, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yeah, should have had that years ago. :) -- Brion

How about automatically removing all redirect pages from all watchlists? I certainly don't want any redir pages on my watchlist, and removing the 100 or so that are on it would at least bring me a bit closer to 500. BTW, I noticed that special:recentchanges still shows watched pages in bold. I assume it isn't really helping the server load that I'm now using recentchanges since my watchlist is disabled? Mkweise 22:30, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I don't like this: you will not know if someone changed the redirect page... Fantasy 22:37, 6 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Recent changes' use of watchlist entries is pretty much "free". To explain... the recentchanges table lists all edits (in the last few days) indexed by timestamp. The database just starts at the most recent and grabs entries in reverse time order until it reaches its limit. For each edit it looks at, it checks the watchlist table for that page, with the direct index keys of your user id and the namespace and title of the page. This should be quite fast, and it only has to check the watchlist for the same number of pages that it actually shows in the results. So if your limit is 200 pages, it looks at up to 200 pages.

The Special:Watchlist view works differently. It takes the entire set of your watchlist, and for each watched title looks up the page(s) that correspond to it. The database sorts them all by reverse timestamp order and then shows only the most recent X number. So if your limit is 200 pages, but you're watching 2000 pages, it had to look at and deal with the full 2000 pages. -- Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

That's interesting, because all I've ever really wanted to see when loading my watchlist has been a list of watched pages that have changed since I last loaded my watchlist (usually < 24 h). It sounds like that could easily be done the same way recentchanges works, and just filtering out non-watched pages instead of bolding the watched ones. Certainly much less work to code than what you're planning... Mkweise 07:12, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Alas, the scale is about the same: we trawl through a couple thousand watchlist entries to see which are recent, or through a couple thousand recent edits to see which are watched. -- Brion 07:28, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Same scale, perhaps. But my way, you're checking the same records for each user, meaning much more cache hits. Also, consider that the users who load their watchlist frequently tend to be the same users who have thousands of watched articles. Thus, a "Show new changes starting from ..." link at the top of the watchlist should really help reduce load. Mkweise 08:17, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I hope the disabling of longer watchlists is intended to be very short term only? I absolutely have well over 500 articles I wish to keep an eye on. I've created more than that number of articles. I would hate if my watchlist remains disabled. -- Infrogmation 00:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Yes, I'm working on rewriting the watchlist and hope to have something that's both workable and faster up soon. Probably by adding a duplicate timestamp field to the watchlist table, which should allow for a pre-indexed sort and hopefully won't slow down page saves significantly. -- Brion 05:26, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Second aproach: 1 hour watchlist

Okay, the current state of affairs is thus:

• no major restructuring of database yet :)
• default time cutoff for Special:Watchlist is now 1 hour, you can select up to 7 days if you dare
• it attempts to judge whether it will be more efficient to check every page in the watchlist or every page edited since the cutoff time, based on how many pages are in your watchlist and how many edited pages it might have to look at
• there's a clickable link to the raw list page where you can remove multiple items

So hopefully this should be fairly usable for the meantime. -- Brion 11:16, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Although I share some of the concerns expressed above (Infrogmation's not the least) I think you've done this in a laudable way! -- Ruhrjung 14:18, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Nice—the way it is now works for me. What would be even better is to have a link to show pages that have changed since the page was last loaded, just like on the recentchanges page. (Or, if you want to get fancy, store a watchlistlastloaded timestamp in the user table and just have the watchlist show pages that have changed since it was last looked at.) Mkweise 16:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Experiences with this unexpected changes

I cannot in all honestness fault the way the watchlist works now. Nor most of all the way the change affects the wikipedia speed and functionality.

Nevertheless, I would like to "vent" the experience I was first faced with (without warning, or phase in). I had an excessive amount of items on my watchlist. Guilty. There was though not a warning to me that this might cause a problem. Rather it seemed to be that a healty watchlist was a guarantee of not many articles going astray for too long. In hindsight, I realize that this must have caused huge bits of duplication of effort both of the hardware, and of the wikipedians themselves.

This does not change the fact that when I was faced (quite unexpectedly) with the ultimatum to reduce my watchlist to below 750 "or else", I tried to think very carefully which pages could I really be the most competent watcher of. Well, guess what? My login timed out during the process. I guess I can just blame myself, but still the experience was not a positive one. And in a pique, next time around I scrapped without discrimination all the articles that weren't in the "User:" or the "Wikipedia:" spaces. In retrospect that may not be that bad, starting from a "clean slate" or something proximate to that, but... (maybe something should be learned about this, or maybe not) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick

Cimon, I was also really surprised, when I saw that I have to reduce my watchlist. My first thought was: NEVER! But I knew, Wikipedia is growing (probably faster that it can handle, sometimes), so there are some growing-problems, but we have really good people looking after this so I gave the problems 2 days. I was wrong, not even one day, and the problem was solved. ;-)

The other solution, to get around this problems, in the real world in real software-projects is the following:

• A team works on the project, creates documents, discusses, tests, quality cecks, changes again, test, ... and after some months or years the real users get the (probably) working version of the software.

Wikipedia is able to support changes "on the fly".

• There is a problem, lets try to solve it. One way is wrong, ok, lets take the other way.

Which one of this two aproaches do you prefer? I go for the Wiki-aproach ;-) Fantasy 08:01, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Is someone or something fooling with the way the personal watchlist is displayed? Seems like it used to come up pretty much however I had set it last session, but this week it is different each day, each session, and is now defaulting to "previous 1 hour." If there is an attempt to default this to some value to cut down on cpu time, put it at 1 day. Marshman 04:23, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I see you only have 40 items in your watchlist, so you probably aren't aware of how big a problem the watchlist code has been. A number of power users have a couple of thousand items in their watchlists, which leads to very very slow load times which tie up the database. I've been working on tweaking it to be easier on the server, and am not finished yet... a 1 day cutoff would not help with the problem population, where the number of edits per day and the number of watched items are of a similar magnitude. My next step is to get it to try to balance off the cutoff, so people with smaller watchlists will have a much longer default cutoff time (or even no time limit). -- Brion 04:52, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Okay, users with fewer than 250 items watched should now get no time cutoff by default. Users with over 250 items will get the 1 hour cutoff by default. -- Brion 05:11, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Thanks. Noticed the difference as soon as I logged in. Probably a good idea to point ouit the expense to ther system of long lists under the instructions. Marshman 08:46, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Is there a record? I had over 5,500 pages watched when it was disabled! :) Martin

The current record-holder is Patrick with 9432 items watched. -- Brion 02:46, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

And I thought I had too many with about 680 (now about 590). Koyaanis Qatsi 13:44, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I use it mainly for bolding Enhanced Recent Changes. Fortunately I read above that Recent changes' use of watchlist entries is pretty much "free". Only when Enhanced Recent Changes for the period I want does not work (the limit seems to be something like 8-12 hours) I have to resort to the Watchlist. - Patrick 22:15, 9 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Saturday, September 13th, 0 2003.

the default amount displayed in watchlists down to 1 hour? I can see that this might have been done for performance reasons, but it's very irritating, especially as it doesn't remember what alternative I opt for. This should surely be a user preference? GRAHAMUK 02:08, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

No problem. Just add a link to http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Watchlist&days=1 or such. -- Taku 02:12, 12 Sep 2003 (UTC)

It changed a while ago, but only triggers when you have more than 250 items on your watchlist. Angela 02:19, Sep 12, 2003 (UTC)

How can I set my watchlist to always check over the past day, rather than the past hour? LirQ

I think the only way is to bookmark this link and use that instead of the normal Special:Watchlist link. Either that or trim your watchlist down to less than 250 pages. Angela 16:40, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Yah, Ive got it bookmarked. But now Im wondering why I have to have it bookmarked. It didnt use to be that way. LirQ

Yeah, it used to show a day's worth of edits by default, but it was changed to be less of a strain on the server, I believe. -- Camembert

Performance issues, unfortunately. Keep posting a link to Wikipedia:Donations whenever it seems appropiate and donate yourself if you can, and we'll get that third server. Pete 16:50, 28 Sep 2003 (UTC)

I'm always getting a message that says This is a saved version of your watchlist and the watchlist doesn't update when I hit refresh? Why is that? How often does it update? And is there any way to force it to update? -- Starx 00:57, 18 May 2004 (UTC)

Due to server problems, watchlists are currently being cached. This means you can only look at it once an hour. If you reload it before the hour is up, you'll just see the cached version. Angela . 04:58, May 18, 2004 (UTC)

My watchlist now won't update, and instead says - 'this is a saved version of your watchlist'. Any ideas why? Thanks! Mark Richards 15:42, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Yes, a developer has enabled cached watchlists to improve performance (which had crawled to a halt pretty much). Dori | Talk 16:27, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

So when do I get the real one, and when the caches one? Thanks, Mark Richards 17:56, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Normally when this is the case, you get one update per hour. -- Jao 18:15, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! Mark Richards 19:55, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

It would be much better simply to reduce the 12-hour default, which as I said on earlier occasions is a total waste. A one-hour default would probably be sufficient to improve performance and would be less "traumatic" than this almost entire disabling of watchlists. -- Wik 20:25, May 17, 2004 (UTC)

An extra option "since I last checked my watchlist" alongside 1,2,6,12 hours could possibly maybe reduce more overhead than it creates... depending how things are implemented. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 21:26, 17 May 2004 (UTC)

It would be great to have a link from 'this is a saved version of your watchlist' to an explanation page. How can this be done ? Pcarbonn 17:03, 25 May 2004 (UTC)

If there was a page about it, it could be linked to from MediaWiki:Wlsaved. Angela . 15:04, May 26, 2004 (UTC)