Help talk:Watchlist labels

Watchlist notes

This sounds great; thanks for working on this technical feature!

How entering a note right after watchlisting could look like

Maybe you could also look into the concept of Watchlist notes – I think these may even be more useful than labels and best in combination with labels. I think many users would use labels to add notes and this could also be revisited at a later point – I think it would be best to also add the ability to add notes after the labels have been implemented.

Please see W437: Notes for watchlisted pages, thanks.
Prototyperspective (talk) 15:14, 21 January 2026 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective Sounds like a great idea, we can pass this one to the designers, ideally you would leave a wish for this separately, because first we will analyse adoption to the initial feature to identify if to spend more time on this or not, and having votes on a new wish could contribute to the analysis as an additional argument. KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 11:30, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Ease of adding labels

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T415173

Similar to the previous post, my suggestion is that the option to add labels to a page in your watchlist should be available in the dropdown at the moment you add the page to the watchlist. This prevents having to search for the page in the watchlist every single time. ～ Misha Vargas (talk | contribs) 10:14, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion, you will be happy to hear that we just started working on that, see Phase 2: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Watchlist_Labels#Acceptance_Criteria_Phase_2 KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 11:27, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

Glad to hear this, KSiebert (WMF)!, and thanks for this neat tool. It sounded like this was intended in part for people with large watchlists, but for those of us in the 5-digit watchlist size, the requirement to go through the "edit watchlist" interface just kind of makes it a non-starter (for me) for the time being. Just a suggestion, though: adding a live search to that edit watchlist interface would resolve this issue, make watchlist labels even more useful, and resolve some other watchlist usability issues. Of course, there's probably no way to do live search without loading the whole thing at once, which may be unrealistic, but food for thought. Rhododendrites (talk) 15:29, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

@Rhododendrites I agree this would be helpful, I filed T416172 yesterday for the general case of searching in EditWatchlist. Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:02, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

This seems like an excellent idea. I'm looking forward to Phase 2, because the current method of assigning labels to pages is too cumbersome. Schazjmd (talk) 23:38, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

Very much agree with this. Without a way to add the label from the Watchlist page directly, the feature is barely usable. At least for users with many pages on the Watchlist which probably are most active contributors and nearly all to whom this feature would be really useful. And additionally This prevents having to search for the page in the watchlist every single time is misleading about the current difficulty of adding labels: one can't search there and there can be thousands of pages in a namespace in the Watchlist. For example, on Commons I was trying to add the Commons:Village pump pages to the discussion label but there were multiple pages of 500s because categories for discussions etc are all also in that namespace.

A simple + button next to Watchlist items would help. This could show a context menu with 'add label' being one item or directly the available labels to add. Prototyperspective (talk) 12:20, 2 March 2026 (UTC)

Seems to be possible using the watchstar now. But could you please make it possible also from the Watchlist page? I think one really can only start using these labels if one can assign them from the Watchlist while checking one's Watchlist. The watch star is just for new additions to the Watchlist, but not for existing pages. Prototyperspective (talk) 16:44, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Filtering Watchlist

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T416172

I’m not sure whether this falls within the project scope, but currently the Watchlist can only be filtered by namespace. When the Watchlist contains a large number of items, assigning labels one by one becomes quite time-consuming.

Allowing users to filter the Watchlist by a text string (matching page titles) would significantly improve usability when dealing with large Watchlists. Ayack (talk) 17:33, 2 February 2026 (UTC)

This is being discussed in T416172! Samwalton9 (WMF) (talk) 16:02, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks @Samwalton9 (WMF)! Ayack (talk) 08:20, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Improvements on the the "manage watchlist labels" page

Speaking as a Commons user with 37000 items on my watchlist, and intending to grow that further, I have three main suggestions after first seeing this tool:

1. Allow users who are editing their watchlist labels, to filter away pages that they have already labelled. That way, one can successively label watchlist entries instead of going through 500 entries by 500 entries with a fine comb selecting which ones go on which label.
2. Allow users who are editing their watchlist labels, to filter by page names via a free text entry. In my case, I have a large number of categories on my watchlist that are named "<prefix> books <suffix>" and "<prefix> maps <suffix>". I would like to first filter them all in one list (all entries that include "books"), to then checkmark them by the bulk and assign labels. As far as I understand things, this is part of the Fabricator ticket T416172, where I added this input. Otherwise, I have pointed it out here now as well.
3. For convenience: The toolbar for "Assign" and "Remove" labels is currently only at the top of the page. Whenever the list goes down farther than 2 screens, it would be great to have duplicate buttons with the same function at the bottom of the page, so that I don't have to scroll all the way back up once I'm done selecting entries.

Best, --Enyavar (talk) 16:26, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

@Enyavar: Sorry for the slow response here! These are all good ideas, thanks for the suggestions. I've created T419790 for filtering by unlabelled (or label, because it seems like that's much the same feature and would be useful). The title-filtering is T416172 and there's already a filter in place — unfortunately however, for performance reasons it's currently only a prefix search and is case-sensitive; we hope to fix up those issues soon. And duplicating the buttons at the bottom is now tracked at T419791. Feel free to leave comments on any of those tasks with extra info. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 05:05, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Watchstar changes

We're going to update the functioning of the watchstar (which isn't a star in all skins, but that seems to be the general name for the watch/unwatch link, even in core). I'm posting updates on T415173, and would love any feedback or ideas anyone has. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 05:52, 12 March 2026 (UTC)

Is there a way to disable this feature?

Sorry but I find this feature to be error inducing. The box on the Source Edit is visually similar to the edit summary and I find my edit summaries go missing because I have typed them in the wrong box. I don't have time to organize the Watchlist anyway.

I also think a much better UI design would parallel the Permanent dropdown just above the "Watchlist labels:". The drop down would list the label and have an Add Label entry at the bottom. This avoid confusion with the Edit Summary. Johnjbarton (talk) 00:00, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

@Johnjbarton: Sorry to hear that this has caused you to lose your edit summaries! I have added instructions for how to hide the field via your common.css page (and will add more about how to hide the feature in other places too). The difference between this and the expiry dropdown is that the label field allows multiple labels to be entered, and that's why it's a different sort of form field. You raise a good point about being able to add labels directly from the editing form, and this is going to be considered as a future improvement (once we've ironed out the bugs with the initial work). Oh, and if you don't use the labels feature, you can delete all your labels and the field will go away (and be replaced by little message saying that you don't have any labels). SWilson (WMF) (talk) 06:47, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

How to...

Just noticed this feature. Regrettably, I have yet to figure out how to actually filter my watchlist using Labels. I have successfully added one Label ("Test") and assigned it to a watchlist item. Instructions on the Help page (associated with this Discussion page) say: "This can be done via the Labels filter dropdown, or by typing the = filter prefix in the filter search bar." I don't see a "Labels filter dropdown" on my English Wikipedia watchlist page and it's not clear what "filter search bar" is intended. It's also not clear to me if "=" is supposed to be followed by a Label name. I see a "Filter" page here on Mediawiki, but not on my Wikipedia watchlist or Labels page. So, my request is: can you (re-)explain how to actually filter a watchlist using Labels? Thanks. DonFB (talk) 05:14, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I'm not the one whom you asked this, but I have a possible explanation. Do you have "disable JavaScript on Watchlist" in preferences turned on on your wiki, @DonFB? IKhitron (talk) 09:01, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

Ha! Thanks, that was the issue. "Label" filter now visible. I think ages ago, I turned off javascript for some reason. Thanks for the tip. DonFB (talk) 20:35, 17 April 2026 (UTC)

Watchlist labels go missing when using HotCat

When I use HotCat to add / modify / remove category (or categories), the current Watchlist label that I have assigned to the file is removed. Hope this can be addressed appropriately - would that be in HotCat? VasuVR (talk) 15:10, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Let me assume it's about phab:T423778. IKhitron (talk) 15:40, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Watchlist for articles created by the user / import of a list of articles

Hello, is it possible to have a (automatic) watchlist

• for all articles created by the user and/or
• for all articles created from a redirect by the user

so I can watch the articles I have created without manually maintaining an extra list.

Is it possible to import a list of articles into a watchlist?

Thanks a lot! M2k~dewiki (talk) 11:31, 1 June 2026 (UTC)