Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Watchlists/Preference to set default watchlist expiry

Preference to set default watchlist expiry

  • Problem: I want every page I edit to be added to my watchlist for a limited time, so I can see what kinds of follow-up changes other users may make in reaction to my edit. Because my edits are generally maintenance-related in nature, I edit a wide range of pages, and have no interest in edits that are made months or years later.
  • Proposed solution: In the Watchlist page of preferences, provide an expiry dropdown next to "Add pages and files I edit to my watchlist", "Add pages and files I move to my watchlist", and each subsequent checkbox in that section, so that a default watchlist expiry time can be set. This default expiry only applies to (a) pages that are currently unwatched, and (b) pages whose watchlist expiry will expire before the default period I set in my preferences (e.g. if the page will leave my watchlist in 2 days, but my preferences stipulate a default expiry of 7 days, the page's watch expiry will be extended to 7 days).
  • Who would benefit: Wikignomes (those who mainly perform maintenance edits across a wide variety of pages)
  • More comments: The amount of development work involved is low. It probably would take an experienced MediaWiki developer 1 or 2 days (not including any design required).
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T265716
  • Proposer: This, that and the other (talk) 04:45, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

I came here to propose precisely this idea for the same reason. I was surprised to see that the expiration option did exist but only if set manually, not as part of the watchlist preferences. I hope this gets more attention in the near future as it would greatly help users who mostly do maintenance edits. - Klein Muçi (talk) 00:29, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Would have supported if I had known voting ended at 18 UTC. ~~~~
User:1234qwer1234qwer4 (talk)
23:20, 11 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]
en:User:Rummskartoffel/auto-watchlist-expiry.js offers a workaround on English Wikipedia. Certes (talk) 20:15, 21 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting