watchlistitis

This is a humorous essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors and is made to be humorous. This page is not one of Wiki's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. This essay isn't meant to be taken seriously.

It results in a constant desire to check one's watchlist. (see Internet addiction disorder). The symptoms, from earliest to latest and most serious, are:

• You add more and more things to your watchlist.
• You always edit them.
• You begin to feel ownership of the articles.
• You procrastinate other, more important work of actually editing the articles and possibly doing your work in reality in order to go to your watchlist.
• You keep looking at the history of the articles.
• You keep looking at the diffs of the articles.
• You lose sleep because of Watchlistitis.
• Your ego becomes visibly inflamed, and you look like a squid.
• You make more than one tab of your browser open as a watchlist.
• You keep looking and looking, and looking, and clicking, and clicking, and keeping at least one tab of your watchlist on browser open at all times...
• You watch forever everything you edit.
  • You don't edit any article not yet watched, lest it lengthen your list.
    • You don't edit Wikipedia at all and only look at your watchlist.
• You miss going to your day job.
• You become fully incorporated into Wikipedia watchlists as a bot, living in your watchlist forever.

This disease can be treated this way:

• You take a wikibreak.
• You quit Wikipedia (don't).
• You remove all the items from your watchlist and put some script on your skin.js page that blocks you every time you look at your watchlist even if there's nothing there.

• Wiki: Don't overload your watchlist!
• Wiki: Don't watch articles that you care about
• Wiki: Editcountitis