Help:Watchlist

This is one of Pikmin Fanon's help pages and is meant to aid users by improving their ability to positively contribute to the wiki. Expanding pages such as this with additional information is always welcome.

Watchlists are a way on Pikmin Fanon to keep up to date on the pages you find important. Only registered users have a watchlist.

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You can watch any page that you visit by clicking on the "watch" button on the tool bar above the page you want to watch. This will add it to your watchlist, located at Special:Watchlist and accessible through the user options at the very top of the page. Many pages can be added to your at a time by selecting the "Edit raw watchlist" link found near the top of the page above the "Watchlist options" box and below the title "My watchlist". once there, pages can freely be added, removed, and changed from the watchlist.

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Your watchlist displays a list of changes made to the pages you are watching, with the most recent edits at the top, providing a Recent changes-type list that shows only the pages you are particularly interested in. This makes it easy for you to see the improvements that others have made to these pages so that you can continue to build on each other's work to improve the page.
By default, the watchlist shows edits from the last three days. You can choose other time periods from the links at the top of the Watchlist page, but the page will reset to show three days again the next time you visit it.
There is no limit to how many pages you can watch, but if you watch more than 1000, the default cutoff for the watchlist will be 12 hours instead of three days. This reduces server load and allows the page to be displayed more quickly. Also, don't put that many pages on your watchlist if you can avoid it. And you can avoid it.
Watched pages will also appear in bold on recent changes.

Removing pages

To remove pages from your watchlist, go to the page and click the "unwatch" button on the tool bar (found in the same place the watch button is on unwatched pages).

To remove many pages at once, go to your watchlist and click the "View and edit watchlist" link found near the top of the page above the "Watchlist options" box and below the title "My watchlist". Then check the button next to all of the pages you want to remove and click the "Remove" button.

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Watchlist preferences

To recieve an e-mail whenever a page on your watchlist is changed, go to the "E-mail options" box in the "User profile" tab in your preferences, and check the box that says "E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed".

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The number of days to show edits from in the watchlist and the maximum number of changes to show in the expanded watchlist can be changed in the "Display options" box of the "Watchlist" tab in your preferences.

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Additional watchlist options are available in the "Advanced options" box of the "Watchlist" tab.

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What you cannot watch

Watchlist only detects actual edits to the wikitext of the page.

Included pages: Changes to transcluded pages can also change the way the watched page is rendered, however these changes do not appear in the watchlist. For more information see Meta Wikimedia's info on Linking to a specific version of a page]. One may choose to watch all the templates used, and the templates used by these templates, etc.

Images and Categories: Watching an image or a category means watching only the editable part. Watchlist will not show uploads of new versions of images. It is not possible to watch a category in the sense of being notified if pages are added or removed. With "related changes," additions to categories can be detected; for removals, one has to watch all pages in the category (also see Help:Category#Detection of additions to a category).

Watching a nonexistent page

One can watch a nonexistent page. This page will appear in the watchlist changes when somebody creates it.

For example, if you watch a page that does not yet have a talk page, you will be notified when someone starts a new discussion on the talk page.

You can watch a page even if neither the content page nor the talk page exists. To do that, go to the page's URL, either by typing the URL directly or following a (broken) link, and then press "Watch" (depending on the skin you may have to press Cancel before getting the link Watch).

Page moves and the watchlist

If a page you have watched is moved to a new title, the new title will be automatically added to your watchlist. Even if the page is later moved back, the new title will remain in your watchlist along with the old one.

Even if the new title is deleted after the page has been moved back, a note about the deletion will appear on your watchlist and the title will remain in your list of watched pages. If you notice mysterious nonexistent pages appearing on your watchlist, this is the most likely explanation.

Related changes feature

The "Related changes" can be used to set up watchlist-like functionality, as explained below.

Pages with links (possibly specially created for this purpose, e.g. as subpages of one's user page) can be used with Related Changes as a collection of separate "watchlists". Note however that unlike My Watchlist, Related Changes does not automatically include talk pages; to watch also the corresponding talk pages, links to them also have to be in the page on which Related Changes is applied. If the links to the talk pages are put just for this purpose, a blank space as link label can be used, which makes the link invisible and ineffective, except for Related Changes. Also, using Related Changes there is not the convenience of pressing a "watch" link to add the current page to the list of "watched pages".

Note that Related Changes does not detect an edit in the page itself and its talk page. Either include a self-link and a link to the talk page in the page, or put the page in another "special watchlist", or in one's standard watchlist.

Such pages can use the template mechanism to include other pages. However, see Pollution of categories.

Watching pages in a category by applying Related Changes to the category has a major drawback: removal of a page from the category is not detected.

An advantage of using Related Changes as alternative for the list of watched pages is that a revision history of the page(s) with links is available, while the system does not keep a record of pages that one has watched. However, Special:Watchlist/raw allows storage of the list: locally, or in a user subpage on the wiki.

If privacy is a concern, an advantage of the watchlist feature (if the list is not stored in a page on the wiki) is that it does not publicly reveal one's interest in a page (if one does not edit it). See also below.

CSS

As an alternative or in addition to using the watchlist feature, one can also define a user style for links to selected pages, putting in one's CSS a list of lines like:

a[title ="pagename"] {color:  white; background: red; font-size: 150% }

This works in Opera, but not in IE.

On the (Enhanced) Recent Changes page it works like the bolding feature mentioned above, but it is more versatile, e.g. allowing extra emphasis on pages one is very interested in, or different styles for different categories of interesting pages. Furthermore, it also works on user contributions pages, and on regular pages (also for piped links, but not for indirect links through a redirect). It also applies, less usefully, for the section editing links in the page itself.

To highlight links to the given page also from other websites, including interlanguage links, use instead of the above:

a[href ="full URL "] { .. }

Note that the full URL is needed, even to highlight links from the same project, even though the HTML code uses the relative URL /wiki/pagename.

Privacy of watchlists

Ordinary users or administrators cannot tell what is in your watchlist, or who is watching any particular page. Developers who have access to the servers that hold the Pikmin Fanon wiki's database can figure out this kind of information. Publicly available database dumps do not include this kind of information.