Help talk:Watchlist/Archive 1

message: Hey all --
It seems that my watchlist has been blanked.  There's nothing there now.  Has anyone else had this happen?  Is it part of a general housecleaning effort?
Thanks, Stormwriter
:Mine is fine. I think the Watchlist only goes back a week now so if your watched pages haven't been edited in that time then a blank watch list would the the expected behavior. I'm pretty sure this limit on watchlists was done to reuduce server load. I, for example, am watching a couple thousand pages and it used to take 3-5 minutes to generate my watch list. --mav 20:01 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
::I find that I get logged out of Wikipedia if I don't make any edits for a while. (Not sure how long it takes, though.) Since users who aren't logged in can do most of the same stuff that logged-in users can, my watchlist going blank is usually the sign that alerts me to the fact that this has happened. Could this be it?
::By the way, why does the watchlist now only go back a week? There were things further down mine that I had there because I was eventually going to get round to doing something about them, but now I can't remember what they were. :( -- Oliver Pereira 20:15 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
Hey guys -- thanks for the info.  I figured it out.  It seems I needed to click "Show changes for the last 7 days" in order for it to open the list.  It defaults to 1 day now.  Stormwriter
: Oh, you can change it! That's all right, then. :) Mine seems to be set to "3 days" by default, though... -- Oliver Pereira 20:33 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
Note that I'm actively working on streamlining the watchlist function to balance performance and usability, so it may change frequently over the next few hours as I put the latest goodies online. --Brion 20:40 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
:thanks very much for this, Brion :-) user:anthere
::I'm grateful for any changes for the better, but is there a list of "latest goodies" anywhere or does everyone have to find out by chance, luck and intuition? KF 20:57 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
I have read many a comment posted particularly by newbies saying that Wikipedia is doomed because anyone can edit a page and create or add all kind of nonsense. I don't think this is a major problem. Rather, I believe this is one of Wikipedia's assets. KF 20:47 Nov 26, 2002 (UTC)
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I'm user:zanimum. My watchlist only list 5 articles now, why is that?
:Read the big bold text in Wikipedia:Watchlist help. --Brion 18:51, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  My watchlist has been blanked! 

message: Okay, the current state of affairs is thus:
* no major restructuring of database yet :)
* default time cutoff for Special:Watchlist is now 1 hour, you can select up to 7 days if you dare
* it attempts to judge whether it will be more efficient to check every page in the watchlist or every page edited since the cutoff time, based on how many pages are in your watchlist and how many edited pages it might have to look at
* there's a clickable link to the raw list page where you can remove multiple items
So hopefully this should be fairly usable for the meantime. --Brion 11:16, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Although I share some of the concerns expressed above (Infrogmation's not the least) I think you've done this in a laudable way! -- Ruhrjung 14:18, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)

text: Nice—the way it is now works for me. What would be even better is to have a link to show pages that have changed since the page was last loaded, just like on the recentchanges page. (Or, if you want to get fancy, store a watchlistlastloaded timestamp in the user table and just have the watchlist show pages that have changed since it was last looked at.) Mkweise 16:03, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Second aproach: 1 hour watchlist 

message: I cannot in all honestness fault the way the watchlist works now. Nor most of all the way the change affects the wikipedia speed and functionality. 
Nevertheless, I would like to "vent" the experience I was first faced with (without warning, or phase in). I had an excessive amount of items on my watchlist. Guilty. There was though not a warning to me that this might cause a problem. Rather it seemed to be that a healty watchlist was a guarantee of not many articles going astray for too long. In hindsight, I realize that this must have caused huge bits of duplication of effort both of the hardware, and of the wikipedians themselves.
This does not change the fact that when I was faced (quite unexpectedly) with the ultimatum to reduce my watchlist to below 750 "or else", I tried to think very carefully which pages could I really be the most competent watcher of. Well, guess what? My login timed out during the process. I guess I can just blame myself, but still the experience was not a positive one. And in a pique, next time around I scrapped without discrimination all the articles that weren't in the "User:" or the "Wikipedia:" spaces. In retrospect that may not be that bad, starting from a "clean slate" or something proximate to that, but... (maybe something should be learned about this, or maybe not) -- Cimon Avaro on a pogostick
:Cimon, I was also really surprised, when I saw that I have to reduce my watchlist. My first thought was: NEVER! But I knew, Wikipedia is growing (probably faster that it can handle, sometimes), so there are some growing-problems, but we have really good people looking after this so I gave the problems 2 days. I was wrong, not even one day, and the problem was solved. ;-)
:The other solution, to get around this problems, in the real world in real software-projects is the following: 
* A team works on the project, creates documents, discusses, tests, quality cecks, changes again, test, ... and after some months or years the real users get the (probably) working version of the software.
:Wikipedia is able to support changes "on the fly". 
* There is a problem, lets try to solve it. One way is wrong, ok, lets take the other way.
: Which one of this two aproaches do you prefer? I go for the Wiki-aproach ;-) Fantasy 08:01, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)
thread_title:  Experiences with this unexpected changes