Problem: There is no easy way to watchlist many similar pages at once, other than adding all of them individually to your watchlist. For example, if I want to watchlist all editions of the Eurovision Song Contest, I'd have to add all 67 of them as well as every new article when it gets created. You can watchlist categories and notice when a new page is added, but that only works if people categorise new pages the way you would expect, and you also still then have to manually add it to your watchlist.
Proposed solution: Introduce a new Special:BulkWatchPages which allows you to watch items by regular expression (with some sane limit), and perhaps other options such as a category. In the example above, the regular expression could be Eurovision Song Contest \d+. Or for templates with subpages, Template:Example(/.*)?. For technical reasons, this would watch every page as if you watched them individually, as opposed to grouping all these pages together as one "watched item". There could also be a Special:BulkUnwatchPages special page so you can un-watch them in bulk, however.
Who would benefit: All editors, especially those who often check other people's edits
I think being able to add a pattern to a watchlist, as if it were itself a "watched item", is not going to scale and is a firm no. However, similar to what I brought up on the cascade-watching wish, we could offer a new special page like Special:BulkWatchPages where you can bulk watch pages (probably up to some limit) based on some parameters such as a regular expression or pattern. You would not be able to unwatch all of those page in one go, however, since there's no concept of relationships between watched items. That said, would the Special:BulkWatchPages idea still be better than nothing, Jochem van Hees? If not, I'm afraid this proposal is out of scope for Community Tech, and we can offer to put this in our Larger suggestions pile or archive it. Thanks, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 19 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@Jochem van Hees: Hello and thanks for taking the time to write this proposal. We are archiving this wish due to a lack of clarification. We needed clarification so that we could accept this wish and mark it for translation so that it could go into voting. Thanks again! Regards, DMaza (WMF) (talk) 13:49, 26 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
No worries. With your approval, I've reworded the proposal to fit what we believe is more in scope and feasible, and have unarchived the proposal. I still have some concerns about people misusing Special:BulkWatchPages tool and watching way too many pages, but we'll worry about that later :) Thanks for replying and participating in the survey! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 27 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support: an upper limit of 200 pages or so to watch simultaneously, and a preview - "You are about to add X pages to your watchlist, as follows: [list]. Please confirm this is correct" - would massively limit the damage of accidental mistakes. Note also that you could bulk unwatch pages by the same conditions as bulk watching (without any parametised relationship between watched items). — Bilorv (talk) 11:28, 30 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Support Lectrician1 (talk) 23:36, 28 January 2022 (UTC)