Help talk:Watchlist

My watchlist has, overnight, started putting little person icons next to user names. It's annoying and distracting. How can I remove it? GiantSnowman 21:11, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

Assuming my memory isn't faulty, the "view and edit watchlist" page used to sort entries by how soon they were to expire. I've noticed that the watchlist has been updated (twice now, I think) and now everything is sorted alphabetically. This means I have to manually look over the whole list to see if anything is about to drop off the list which I might want to add more time to, and hope I didn't miss any articles while doing so. The new "view and edit watchlist" page is formatted like a table, but unfortunately the columns don't seem to be sortable. I've looked in the preferences but wasn't able to find a way to set it to restore the previous sort order.

Is there an option I missed somewhere to sort by time left until expiry? If not, does anyone happen to know if whether this option is planned for future updates, and whether these changes are made here on Wikipedia or over on the broader MediaWiki project? If this isn't the right place to ask, can someone point me in the right direction? – Scyrme (talk) 07:43, 12 January 2026 (UTC)

So we got a labelling system recently, which is interesting, but is making the "expiry" column sortable not on the table? Should I be asking this somewhere over on MediaWiki? – Scyrme (talk) 18:26, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

I was advised on Phabricator to add my support to Meta:Community Wishlist/W454 to help the developers assess the priority of developing a method for sorting watchlist items by expiry. If you were also affected by the change in sort order, please add your support too! – Scyrme (talk) 17:55, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

(In the meantime, this script, User:KylieTastic/EditWatchlistByExpiry, may help; though it only sorts page by page). – Scyrme (talk) 18:11, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

How the heck do I stop Wikidata pages from being included in my watchlist? I don't care about edits in the Wikidata of an article. Pyxis Solitary (yak). ⚢ 07:04, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

@Pyxis Solitary: In Preferences → Watchlist → Advanced options there's a checkbox to turn this on and off. -- John of Reading (talk) 07:49, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

@John of Reading: Yay! Thank you! I did it. Pyxis Solitary (yak). ⚢ 14:52, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

A new large 'Create and assign labels' box appears every time the watchlist is clicked, please can someone get rid of this "new improvement" (a make-work idea from someone at the WMF?). The large box also obscures the Watchlist messages at the top. Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:24, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Hi Randy Kryn - click to the last screen and click "got it" (the only thing I got was annoyed). There is a Help desk discussion here. Best wishes - Arjayay (talk) 16:37, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Arjayay. Randy Kryn (talk) 16:39, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Moved to User talk:Cacycle/wikEd § EditWatchlist/raw is broken. Just me?

 – —⁠andrybak (talk) 20:45, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

(Summary: it's been broken since 2018.) -RememberOrwell (talk) 21:39, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

I could just be a little on the blind side, but I don't see help covering saved filters. I know how to use them generally, but I was wondering if you can change the filtering choices within an existing saved filter. I have never been able to effectively do that without creating a new saved filter. Stefen 𝕋ower ^{Huddle • Handiwerk} 20:49, 5 March 2026 (UTC)

I just noticed that my watchlist hit 15,000 which made me wonder if there's a limit to how many pages I can watch? Will I hit some technical hard limit at some point? Or if not, would be best to stay below some number for better performance etc.? And either way, what is the magic number I shouldn't exceed? -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 15:20, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

I have over 28,000 on mine. Performance isn't too bad except that long ago I went into the raw editor to sort and cull my list, only to find that it couldn't handle the update. Largoplazo (talk) 16:55, 7 March 2026 (UTC)

If you in this example Watchlist:

15 March 2026

• 11:02          (diff | hist)          Article. . (+28) . . User:Example (talk | contribs) (Add yet another category))

14 March 2026

• 00:02          (diff | hist)          Article. . (+25) . . User:Example (talk | contribs) (Add another category))

13 March 2026

• 23:59          (diff | hist)          Article. . (+43) . . User:Example (talk | contribs) (Add category)

1. Only opened the 13 March 2026 23:59 diff link in a new tab.
2. Did nothing else but opened and closed that tab (in other words without navigating to the newer versions/diffs of the article).
3. Returned to the Watchlist tab and refreshed the page.
4. All entries from all days to Article disappear from the Watchlist even though you never really navigated through them all.

Has the Watchlist always behaved like this? I could've sworn it didn't do that before. It used to leave the other newer entries on the Watchlist, I think. Kliituu (talk) 10:07, 14 March 2026 (UTC)