监视页面功能允许任何登录用户保存一个“监视”页面的列表，并将这些页面的近期编辑状况发送给用户。
Mediawiki软件不允许用户“拥有”某个页面，然而监视列表功能以及撤销功能可以使用户长期参与改善感兴趣的页面，而不会使用户拥有页面内容的控制权。
只能监视非动态生成的页面。
该页面始终与其对话页面一起被监视。 监视页面列表中的所有添加和删除都适用于非对话页面/对话页面组合：无法只监视一个页面而不监视另一个。
A new watchlist feature is included in MediaWiki 1.35: Watchlist Expiry. With this feature, you can optionally select to watch a page for a temporary period of time. Once the watch period has expired, the page will be automatically removed from your watchlist. You can update the watch period at any time, including switching from temporary to permanent status. Temporarily watched pages are usually represented by a half star (as opposed to a full star, which represents permanently watched pages). To find out when Watchlist Expiry will be enabled on your wiki, you can check out the release schedule on Meta-wiki. For documentation on how to use the feature, please visit 帮助:监视列表的有效期.
When the user is logged in, every page has a link to the user's watchlist, also accessible by the link Special:Watchlist. This page shows a list of all recently changed watched pages, separated by days, ordered backward according to the time of the edit.
Each line shows details of each edit: whether minor (小) or major, whether made by a bot (机), the time, a link to the page, the difference between the current version and the last one, the history, the increase or decrease of the number of bytes, the user name, the user's talk page, the user's contributions and the edit summary. Depending on site configuration, the page name is bolded if the page has changed after the last time the user viewed the page (while logged in).
Technically, the watchlist is just another way to filter recent changes. The entries come from the recentchanges table and are therefore restricted to edits not older than $wgRCMaxAge (30 days in most WMF projects).
One can hide or show the following types of edits, using the corresponding links: minor edits, bot edits, one's own edits. These can also be set in preferences as initial options when the user comes to Special:Watchlist page.
Another preference option, although named "Maximum number of days to show in watchlist", also sets only the initial value for a period of time for which changes are shown. This period can be easily changed with corresponding links.
There is also a drop-down box that allows to see the changes only in one specific namespace.
Unlike recent changes, watchlist cannot hide edits by logged in/logged out users, there are no links to show only specific number of edits, and there is no way to show all namespaces except one.
By default watchlist only shows the last edit to each watched page.
There are two possible problems if a page had a non-minor recent edit, but the last edit was marked as minor:
Since one is typically interested in all changes since one last checked, in this case the history of the page needs to be checked.
Many experienced users prefer to use Expanded Watchlist.
With the preference "展开监视列表以显示所有更改，而不仅是最近期更改" the watchlist will show all recent edits, listed in chronological order.
In this case the preference "按页面组合显示最近更改和监视列表中的更改", which toggles enhanced recent changes, also affects the watchlist the same way: recent changes of watched pages are grouped by day, and within a day by page.
Another preference option is "监视列表中显示的最大更改数：". A site can limit the maximum value for this option, for example the maximum seems to be 1000 on WMF projects.
To show pages with older edits, view the changes by namespaces or use the non-enhanced watchlist, and/or reduce the number of watched pages.
The watchlist is only one of the features with regard to watching pages; even without ever using it, specifying pages to watch is useful.
In Recent Changes, Enhanced Recent Changes, and Related Changes, watched pages are bolded.
If one views the history of a watched page directly, without first viewing the page, the edit at the top (the most recent one) may be marked using update marker message with id (讨论) 更新于您上次访问后; this applies if the edit was made by someone else and you have not viewed the page (while logged in) since it was made. This is actually enabled together with email notification.
From MediaWiki 1.5, you can get an email after a watched page has been edited by somebody else. This will not be repeated until you view the page. Viewing a diff or the page history is not enough. Note that you have to be logged in when viewing the page, otherwise you will not be notified of further changes. Optionally this notification system can ignore minor changes (this is the default).
Whether the feature is enabled on a wiki can be seen in the preferences: if it is, the message with id (讨论) 当我的监视列表中的页面或文件发生更改时发送电子邮件通知我 will be one of the options of the main section. The notifications for user talk edits are enabled by another preference option.
Having a separate email for every edited page that one likes to watch in the sense of the other watch features, may be too much. New features are being proposed and developed to deal with this: the option to have emails sent, after a delay, with a list of edited pages, and/or the possibility to specify a subset of watched pages for email notification. 参见Echo (Notifications)。
For the latter, as a workaround, one may be tempted to log in under a different username just to specify a different (typically smaller) watchlist for email notification. However, after viewing a page under one username, one would have to clear the notification flag for that page for the other username too.
To enable it on a wiki, $wgEnotifWatchlist is set to true, and it still depends on preference settings. The email-message below is: message with id (讨论) 尊敬的 $WATCHINGUSERNAME：
您好！ $PAGEINTRO $NEWPAGE $PAGELOG
编辑摘要：$PAGESUMMARY $PAGEMINOREDIT
可通过以下方式联系编辑者： 电子邮件：$PAGEEDITOR_EMAIL 用户页面：$PAGEEDITOR_WIKI
在您登录并访问该页面之前，我们不会发送新增更改的通知。您也可以重设您的监视列表中所有监视页面的通知标志。
MediaWiki通知系统
-- 更改邮件通知设置： https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences 更改监视列表设置： https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:EditWatchlist 从监视列表中删除该页面： $UNWATCHURL 反馈与其他帮助: $HELPPAGE See Email notification. Since May 2011 the feature is enabled on all Wikimedia projects for the user talk notifications, and since April 2012 for watchlist edits too. From early May 2012, the preference for edited pages to be added to watchlist is the default.
The following options are (or can be) available in Preferences >> User Profile tab
Email notification has many settings, so if you think you've missed something check them carefully.
Look for bolded items in your Special:Watchlist: they're pages you've not yet seen after recent changes and you won't be notified about them (note: your wiki may have hidden this essential highlighting feature).
This behavior is not documented nor configurable and has some bugs; see T40874.
See also the list of known bugs.
监视列表只侦测实际编辑页面的wikitext。
For more information see Help:Page history#Linking to a specific version of a page. One may choose to watch all the templates used, and the templates used by these templates, etc.
Watchlist will not show uploads of new versions of images. It is not possible to watch a category in the sense of being notified if pages are added or removed. With "related changes," additions to categories can be detected; for removals, one has to watch all pages in the category.
One can watch a nonexistent page. This page will appear in the watchlist changes when somebody creates it.
For example, if you watch a page that does not yet have a talk page, you will be notified when someone starts a new discussion on the talk page.
You can watch a page even if neither the content page nor the talk page exists. To do that, go to the page's URL, either by typing the URL directly or following a (broken) link, and then press "Watch" (depending on the skin you may have to press Cancel before getting the link Watch).
页面移动和监视列表 如果一个你监视的页面移动到了一个新标题，新标题将自动添加至你的监视列表中。 Even if the page is later moved back, the new title will remain in your watchlist along with the old one.
Even if the new title is deleted after the page has been moved back, a note about the deletion will appear on your watchlist and the title will remain in your list of watched pages. If you notice mysterious nonexistent pages appearing on your watchlist, this is the most likely explanation.
The "Related changes" can be used to set up watchlist-like functionality, as explained below.
Pages with links (possibly specially created for this purpose, e.g. as subpages of one's user page) can be used with Related Changes as a collection of separate "watchlists". Note however that unlike My Watchlist, Related Changes does not automatically include talk pages; to watch also the corresponding talk pages, links to them also have to be in the page on which Related Changes is applied. If the links to the talk pages are put just for this purpose, a blank space as link label can be used, which makes the link invisible and ineffective, except for Related Changes. Also, using Related Changes there is not the convenience of pressing a "watch" link to add the current page to the list of "watched pages".
Note that Related Changes does not detect an edit in the page itself and its talk page. Either include a self-link and a link to the talk page in the page, or put the page in another "special watchlist", or in one's standard watchlist.
Such pages can use the template mechanism to include other pages.
Watching pages in a category by applying Related Changes to the category has a major drawback: removal of a page from the category is not detected.
An advantage of using Related Changes as alternative for the list of watched pages is that a revision history of the page(s) with links is available, while the system does not keep a record of pages that one has watched. However, Special:Watchlist/raw allows storage of the list: locally, or in a user subpage on the wiki.
If privacy is a concern, an advantage of the watchlist feature (if the list is not stored in a page on the wiki) is that it does not publicly reveal one's interest in a page (if one does not edit it). 另请参见下文。
As an alternative or in addition to using the watchlist feature, one can also define a user style for links to selected pages, putting in one's CSS a list of lines like:
a[title ="pagename"] {color: white; background: red; font-size: 150% }
This works in Opera, but not in Internet Explorer.
On the (Enhanced) Recent Changes page it works like the bolding feature mentioned above, but it is more versatile, e.g. allowing extra emphasis on pages one is very interested in, or different styles for different categories of interesting pages. Furthermore, it also works on user contributions pages, and on regular pages (also for piped links, but not for indirect links through a redirect). It also applies, less usefully, for the section editing links in the page itself.
To highlight links to the given page also from other websites, including interlanguage links, use instead of the above:
a[href ="full URL "] { .. }
Note that the full URL is needed, even to highlight links from the same project, even though the HTML code uses the relative URL /wiki/pagename.
Ordinary users or administrators cannot tell what is in your watchlist, or who is watching any particular page. Developers who have access to the servers that hold the Wikipedia database can figure out this kind of information. Publicly available database dumps do not include this kind of information.