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"Hide trusted users" checkbox option on watchlists and related/recent changes (RC) pages
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Proposed in Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016. Received 37 support votes, and ranked #40 out of 265 proposals. View full proposal with discussion and votes here.

Problem

I trust a number of editors/bots as much as I trust myself (maybe even more in some cases), but their edits cannot be filtered out of watchlists and RC pages like I can filter out my own. This makes my watchlists and RC pages considerably more burdensome to work through than seems reasonable at times.

Who would benefit

Anyone who maintains a sizable watchlist or uses RC pages; RC patrollers; Vandalism hunters.

Proposed solution

Allow users to 'trust' other users by clicking a "Trust/Remove trust" link on user pages. (This could be represented by a graphic in some skins.) This will build a non-public "trusted users" list for the user that they can edit (add/remove) similarly to a watchlist. Then, on watchlists and RC pages, a user can check "Hide trusted" similarly to how they can check "Hide my edits", thus reducing the number of watchlist/RC items to check in many cases.

More comments

  • Some additional aspects that could be added as part of this include:
  • "Page information" on user pages could show "Number of trusters" (e.g., <30 or actual number that is 30 or above).
  • Statistics on who are the most trusted editors could be assembled. (This could be a new data point for RfAs.)
  • Regarding trusted bots, you might wonder why someone wouldn't just hide all bots. Well, there are some bots I trust with everything they do, and some I don't.
  • Implementing this proposal would help in vandalism hunting because it would make it more convenient to zero in on bad edits and more comfortable for users to maintain larger watchlists, thus having an ability to catch more vandalism than before.
  • This proposal should work very well in concert with other proposals, e.g. Watchlist priorities or Multiple watchlists, to help us keep our watchlists shaped to what we should be paying most attention to.

Technical details

Time, expertise and skills required

  • e.g. 2-3 weeks, advanced contributor, javascript, css, etc

Suitable for

  • e.g. Hackathon, GSOC, Outreachy, etc.

Proposer

Stevie is the man

Related links

Event Timeline

This task was proposed in the Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016 and in its current state needs owner. Wikimedia is participating in Google Summer of Code 2017 and Outreachy Round 14. To the subscribers -- would this task or a portion of it be a good fit for either of these programs? If so, would you be willing to help mentor this project? Remember, each outreach project requires a minimum of one primary mentor, and co-mentor.

Hi @srishakatux. This sounds like an interesting (if somewhat specialized) feature. I don't think Collab Team has any objection to it. But you should know that we're building a feature that is related and could serve at least some of the same purpose.

T167224 describes the new "User" filters we're adding to Watchlist and Recent Changes this quarter. Reviewers can turn on "Exclude" mode to exclude contributions from any users they choose. Additionally, RC Page (and Watchlist soon) users now have the ability to save filter settings for later use. So, between the two of these, it will be possible for users to set up and save searches that exclude selected users. Of course, it's not as seamless as what you're envisioning.

Roan estimates the practical limit for the approach I just sketched out would be "a few dozen" users. In fact, FYI, @Catrope suspects that such a limit would also apply to your new feature, for what it's worth.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".