The Watchlist is free, native and the right place to start. It also has four specific limits, all of them documented by Wikipedia and MediaWiki themselves. Here is what it does, where it stops, and when that gap is worth $99 a year.
It is free, it is built by the people who run the encyclopedia, and it needs no third party. If you are already logged into Wikipedia every day, it will show you every change to every page you follow, in one list, with full diffs a click away.
For an active editor, that is the correct tool and nothing here should talk you out of it.
MediaWiki's own manual states that after a notification is sent you have to visit the page while logged in before another one will be sent. If you do not, the alerts stop, and nothing tells you they have stopped. For someone who is not a daily editor, this is the difference between being watched and believing you are watched.
Wikipedia's help documentation says email notification cannot be limited by page. Follow anything else and those changes arrive in the same inbox, so the one article you actually care about competes with everything else you have ever watched.
It tells you the page was edited and links you to it. Working out what happened means opening the history and comparing revisions yourself. At 5 AM on a phone, that is the step where most people decide to look at it later.
A registered, logged-in Wikipedia account, with notification settings spread across two preference tabs. Not difficult, but it is a Wikipedia account created solely to watch yourself, which many subjects would rather not have.
| Wikipedia Watchlist | WikiMonitor | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $99 a year, one page |
| Wikipedia account | Required | Not required |
| Alert on every edit | First edit, then it stops | Every edit |
| Change included | No, link only | Yes, in the email |
| Scoped to one page | No | Yes |
| Editor identified | In the history | In the email |
| Speed | No stated target | Within 60 seconds |
You edit Wikipedia regularly, you are logged in most days, and checking a list is already part of your routine. It is free and it is enough.
The article is about you or your company, you are not going to log into Wikipedia every day, and finding out late would cost you something. The gap the Watchlist leaves is exactly the case where it matters.
Tell us the page and where alerts should go. We confirm the article is the right one and take you straight to checkout.
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