Screencast on using the Wikipedia watchlist: transcript

Key points

• A new account has an empty watchlist because articles must be added actively.
• Articles are added by clicking the star button at the top of a page; the demo uses articles from the in the news section.
• The watchlist shows recent revisions in a layout similar to the revision history, with article, last editor, time and bytes added or removed.
• A diff link shows the difference from the previous revision, and an M symbol marks minor edits.
• Watching an article also watches its talk page.
• The speaker recommends watching articles you created, user pages and other pages of interest.

Chapters

1. 0:00What the watchlist is and why it starts empty
2. 0:35Adding articles with the star button
3. 1:51Reading the watchlist: edits, diffs and minor edits
4. 3:01What to watch and how talk pages are included

Full transcript

0:00Hello, I'm Ich Du Nicht and in this screencast I will tell you something about the watchlist of Wikipedia. If you go to the top of the page when you are logged in, you will see that there is a watchlist link. And if you have just created your account and you go on that link, there will not be much that is displayed. because you have to add articles actively to your watchlist.

0:35So in order to show you how the watchlist works, I'll go back to the main page, click on the puzzle wall. And now I will just open some articles which I assume are currently edited a lot. And this is usually true for all the articles which are in the section in the news on the main page. So I'll open those three articles which are currently in the news. When I go to these articles I can click on that star button and this will add this article to my watch list.

1:19Do that for all three articles. Click on the star and it will be added to my watch list. Click on the star and add it to the watch list. So now I can close these tabs and I'm back on the main page. If I now hit the watch list link I get a display which is similar actually to what you see when you hit the view history button.

1:51so you get a list of all revisions of those articles which are on your watch list that are happening in the last few days and the structure is exactly the same like the history of revisions so you will have the article link you'll have the user who made the last edit and you'll have the time and if there is a substantial edit you can also see how many bytes have been added or deleted from the article and just as the revision history you can click on diff link in order to see the difference between that revision which has just been made and the previous revision You can also see whether there was a minor edit, then there's this M symbol showing, and there are further abbreviations which are explained in this box, which you might see in that list.

3:01And this is a very, very useful tool to see what is happening to the articles you have created. so i recommend that you add all your articles that you have created to your watch list but also to other all other pages that are of any interest to you that's not only articles but also user pages wikipedia pages and other pages and if you put any article on your watch list you will automatically also watch its talk page so for example here you can see the talk page of that article and they are both on your watch list so adding articles to your watch list works via the star button on top of the page and then you can access all these articles via the watchlist link and you can see all the recent changes

4:04that have been made to those articles

Source and licence

Recording: File:Watchlist.webm by Ichdunich (2020-05-29), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.