There were many complaints from English Wikipedians regarding the implementation of the $wgShowUpdatedMarker function, which allows an editor to use "Updated (since my last visit)" to mark watched articles with new changes. A discussion about this new watchlist functionality has been initiated in a current discussion regarding the styling of the watchlist. This update will allow users to see the difference in content between the current revision and the revision from the date of their last visit. This feature has already been implemented at Commons and Wiktionary.
Currently there are three options regarding how or if to release the customizing, and 10 current styles to choose from. These range from stars to underscores to bold or italics.
Any logged-in editor can manually install the customization into their common.css page:
span.updatedmarker {
background-color: transparent;
color: #006400;
}
.mw-special-Watchlist strong.mw-watched a {
font-weight: bold;
}
More styling options can be found at Wikipedia:Customizing watchlists.
The request for comment attracted 72 !votes in support and 100 against. Oppose !voters expressed a desire to be able to opt-out of the change, as SoWhy put it: "If you want to use it, use it. But don't bother the rest of us with it. All Gadgets work that way – I see no reason why this one shouldn't. ... I think it should be integrated into My Preferences => Gadgets to make it easy for people to use it if they want."
Making this change into a gadget, rather than the css or javascript version, was a running theme through the oppose section. Waggers stated in support, "Not making [watchlist customizing] available by default is silly as it means many editors who would find it useful would never find that this is available."
Equazcion referenced the errors in the current code for this feature by saying "In trying to script customizations for this feature I realized its technical implementation is exceedingly poor and very limiting. It was done with a <strong> tag in an odd location, when it should've been done purely with classes. Styling a feature like this using an HTML tag is so very 1999. This is old code and shouldn't have been newly implemented on an additional wiki before it was updated. Rather than merely making it invisible, this entire thing should be completely disabled until it's coded better and a style is chosen by the community. Even then, the new feature cycle generally starts with opt-in, then after a while someone might propose turning it on by default across the board. That would be the cycle to follow here."
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