2012/5/9 Arun Ganesh <arun.plane...@gmail.com>: > I thought of studying my watchlist for a moment to understand why it was > the way it was, and I noticed the following:
Thanks a lot for the review. The watchlist is like an inbox for me and for a lot of other people, although better statistic is needed to know how many. See comments below. > 1. My watchlist begins half the page down, because of the watchlist > options box, which btw I have never used or peered into. I visit that page so frequently that I just got used to that. But every time I teach people to use Wikipedia, it strikes me again. Also notice that various projects often customize the area above the list. Many frequent editors visit this page all the time, so it's a good place for community notifications and various utility links. Of course, different projects do it completely differently and complain when MediaWiki updates break their customizations :) It may be worth to research what projects put there, and add the most common customizations to the core software. > 2. The first link in each item is that of the current article. I have > never clicked this because I might as well go through the changes by using > (diff) I frequently click it... but actually I mostly do it to remove the page from the watchlist if I lost interest in it. There are gadgets that do it directly from the watchlist, but I got used to the old way, and I guess that I also want to take that one last goodbye look :) Click statistics can be useful here, too. > 3. I have never clicked (hist) on the watchlist, I would first see the > (diff) and only then browse the history I click the history link all the time. It's much more useful than the diff link. The diff link shows only the last edit, and there may have been others. > 4. 0 is colored grey making it disappear from the list. But that does > not mean the article never changed, it could be +400 -400 words but the net > is 0. The edit calculation can be highly misleading. I would rather want to > know how many characters were added and how many deletions. Articles which > have only additions are low on my priority list to patrol. A half-related comment: The MindTouch wiki software shows the number of words added and removed. It's used in the Mozilla Developer Network, for example: https://developer.mozilla.org/index.php?title=en/Localization_Quick_Start_Guide/Initial_setup&action=history > 5. Before contacting any user or checking his (contribs), I would > always see what his edit was. I open the (diff) and (contribs) in new tabs. > This could have become integrated because its part of the same task. Same > goes for talk and the user page links littered all over my watchlist +1, in general, but this also has a dark side: there are trigger-happy patrollers who revert most edits by user with red links. The people who research participation and editor retention statistics (Brandon and others) may have a lot of data about this. > 8. I can jump to the specific section directly by clicking the tiny → > but not the section name itself. I have never used this link either as i > would rather see the (diff) I use that link frequently. Linking the section name is a very good idea. > With that in mind I made this, which would solve most of my issues: > http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mw-ux-visual_watchlist.png > Let me know if it would work for you as well? I hope to put some more > thought on it and improving the idea. Very, very nice. Watchlist needs revamping and this is a good direction. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
