Help:Watching pages

Watching pages is a technique, utilized by many users to keep track of the progress of certain pages that concern them. Watched pages are gathered in the user's personal watchlist, and they appear in bold in the list of Recent changes.

Pages can be marked for watching both in read and in edit mode. Reading a page, one can mark it for watching by clicking on the "watch" tab on the horizontal bar over the page title. Pages, which were opened in edit mode, can be marked by ticking the "Watch this page" option under the Summary and over the Save page / Show preview buttons.

Marking a page for watching, one automatically adds to one's watchlist its talk page, as well.

Important to know is the situation with categories. By including a category to their watchlist, users can only watch the page in the Category: namespace, i.e. the changes that will occur over the category itself, not inside of it. Watchists do not help understanding which pages have been added to or removed from this category.

Various personal preferences are related to the functionality of watching pages, which is accessible only to registered users. Every registered user has access only to their personal watchlist, not to anyone else's.

See also

• Special:Watchlist
• Help:Watching pages from Meta-Wikipedia
• Help:Contents with links to other help pages