Watchlist How-To

Document Goal Help wiki users maintain and use their watchlist.

Audience Wiki users (editors/writers) who are Fedora contributors or otherwise interested in the status of wiki pages.

Contributors You!

Watching One or More Pages

You cannot use regular expressions, globbing, or wildcards in MediaWiki. An extension is under review that allows for wildcards across subpages. Other ideas, such as watching entire Namespaces: are being looked in to. This is what you need to do today to watch pages.

For any page, just click watch
You can edit your watchlist in various ways through the my watchlist interface.
Although it doesn't accept wildcards/regular expressions, the Edit raw watchlist view is good for writing out a number of pages directly. One method is to manually migrate your list from Moin Moin, expanding the regular expressions into the page names you remember.
Additional preferences for your watchlist are set via the my preferences interface, in the Watchlist tab. For example, you can set preferences to automatically put every page you create or edit in your watchlist.

Growing Your Watchlist

Manually expand your list by editing the raw watchlist.
Set your preferences to automatically put every page you create or edit in your watchlist via the my preferences interface, in the Watchlist tab.

Email tips

Your @fedoraproject.org email address is automatically filled in upon login. If you would like to change this, change your preferences accordingly.

No diffs in watch emails at the moment
Diffs are not currently sent in watch emails. We are working on a way to solve this. In the mean time, you can use the RSS feeds, which contain full diffs.

RSS tips

RSS and Atom links are available on the Recent Changes page and the history page for every article. This allows you to track all the changes or the changes for one article.

You can subscribe to your watchlist, which requires you to perform HTTP authentication to get the feed.

Web-based RSS Reader

Your web account should be able to authenticate from your cookie's existing auth cookie. Use this as the feed source:

username:password@fedoraproject.org//w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&feedformat=rss

Substitute username with your Fedora account username and password with your password. You may need to urlencode the password if it uses special characters. There are online tools you can use to urlencode (here or here; neither of these are security vetted by the Fedora Project.) You can also construct it with a urlencode chart.

Offline RSS Reading

This is currently the only known way to pull a feed of your watchlist in to an offline reader, such as Liferea.

Create a shell script in your ~/bin/ directory, for example called fpwiki-feed-grabber, and put in the following shell script:

#!/bin/sh
CURL="/usr/bin/curl"
OPTIONS="-o"
FEEDFILE="/tmp/fpwiki-watchlist-feed.xml"
HTTPS="https://"
USERNAME="username"
PASSWORD="password"
FEEDSRC="@fedoraproject.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&feedformat=rss"

$CURL $OPTIONS $FEEDFILE $HTTPS$USERNAME:$PASSWORD$FEEDSRC

Substitute your Fedora account username and password with your password. Read the note in #Web-based RSS Reader about how to urlencode the password, if needed.
Run the script to test the output, looking in the resulting XML file for an actual feed or error information.
Add a job to your personal crontab (crontab -e):

# hourly page check
30 * * * *      $HOME/bin/fpwiki-feed-grabber

This checks your feed hourly; adjust the time to fit your personal need.
Feed readers, such as Liferea, can subscribe to a feed that is on your local file system. Point the feed at the file /tmp/fpwiki-watchlist-feed.xml.

Using Special:Allpages

Use the Special:Allpages feature to list pages with a specific prefix.
Use your mouse to drag, copy and paste the results into a text file.
Use a search/replace feature to change any horizontal tab characters '\t' to new line characters '\n'.
Paste the results into your raw watchlist.

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