Help:Public watchlist

A public watchlist is a tool for monitoring changes to a certain list of articles. It is comparable to the personal watchlist to which all registered Wikipedia users get access when they create an account. For information about personal watchlists, see Help:Watching pages.

There is no software infrastructure designed on Wikipedia to make a public watchlist. This page gives instructions for a workaround which replicates this functionality to the best extent possible with a reasonable effort.

Instructions

1. Create a page, perhaps in one's userspace or in a projectspace
2. In that page create a list of all articles and all talkpages to be watched
3. Go to the public watch page once it is populated and click "Related changes" in the toolbox on the left of the screen, then noting the link
4. Note the URL
5. Paste the URL on a userpage or project page or anywhere else that you would like to keep the link to this public watchlist
6. To check related changes to all items on the public watch page, click that link

Differences between the public watchlist and the personal watchlist

• The "watch" button at the top of the page can only work for the personal watchlist
• The personal watchlist cannot be directly viewed by any user except the account owner
• The personal watchlist always watches both the talk page and the corresponding non-talk page of watched pages (to achieve this with the public watchlist, include separate talk and non-talk links for each page to be watched)
• This public watchlist creation process is not an intended use of the software

Applications

A public watchlist is useful when a group of people all want to monitor the same set of pages. This could be used in a WP:WikiProject or any other organization of users.

Templates

When creating and maintaining a public watchlist the {{la2}} template can be useful. It lets you add an article and its associated talk page as a pair. For example, {{la2|Moon}} would render as Moon (talk) thus adding both the main article and its talk page at the same time.

Example

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Sri Lanka Reconciliation/watchall: Recent Related Changes.
• {{Recent changes in Medicine}}
  • Category:Recent changes boxes

See also

• meta:Share watchlists, a 2003 discussion of the same concept.
• Help:Related changes
• {{delmon}}, a template specifically used to create public watchlists of deletion-tagged pages