Shortcut: Help:WL
Help:Watchlist
Your watchlist is a display for tracking changes, similar to the recent changes display, but limited to showing changes only across your set of "watched" pages. You can see your watchlist by following the "Watchlist" link in your account menu (on the top right). This feature is only available to users who have registered and logged in.
Add pages to watchlist
[edit]Before you see anything interesting here, you have to actually add some pages to your watchlist. Do so by navigating to a page that interests you, and click the star icon (or "Watch" tab).
A page already in your watchlist will be marked with a blue star (or "Unwatch" tab).
If you want to remove pages from your watchlist, click on the blue star icon (or "Unwatch" tab).
Why a watchlist
[edit]Typically you would watch pages related to your interest areas, and also pages where you care most about the content. If you make a significant edit to a page, you might want to watch the page (so you know when there are any follow-up edits). Note that there is a also a checkbox on the edit screen ("Watch this page") for this purpose.
Your watchlist is personal. You can watch any page you want. That choice will remain private.
Use your watchlist
[edit]On the watchlist display, some page names appear in bold. This indicates whether or not you have visited the page to see the change. It's a bit like read/unread emails in an email inbox. The "Recent changes" display will also have some new bold highlighting, but for a different reason. Here bold is just indicating edits to pages on your watchlist.
You can combine different kinds of filters to display the results you want, such as choosing what types of edits to look at, unseen changes, or filter by the age of the account that made the changes.
Email notifications
[edit]According to the relevant preferences, changes to pages you watch may also be notified to you by email.
The main preference for this is "Email me when a page or a file on my watchlist is changed".
After receiving an email notification for a page, you have to visit the page while logged in if you want to be notified of further changes to the same page.
Watchlist feed with token
[edit]You can set up an RSS or Atom feed of your watchlist that is accessible even when logged out:
- Get your watchlist token from Special:Preferences/Watchlist
- Your watchlist RSS feed can be found at https://www.wikidata.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&wlowner=USERNAME&wltoken=TOKEN, where USERNAME is your username without the User: prefix and TOKEN is the watchlist token.
- If you would prefer an Atom feed rather than an RSS one, add "&feedformat=atom" to the Link of your feed.