Last modified: 2014-10-08 00:48:44 UTC
To reproduce: 0. Log in. 1. Add a non-existent article to your watchlist. 2. Open the watchlist in list view: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Watchlist&watchlistview=a-z 3. Search for the name of the deleted article. Observed: The star in that line is white. Expected: The star in that line is supposed to be green. The article is in the watchlist, so it should be marked just like all others. The red color of the link already indicates that it's deleted.
Prioritization and scheduling of this bug is tracked on Trello card https://trello.com/c/DMwr5EoU
*** Bug 70798 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bahodir did some investigation into this. Here's what he discovered: "My findings so far: 1. You can only watch a non-existent page in the destop version of the site. If you try to do so in the mobile version, your change to watch the page doesn't stick. Try refreshing the page and you'll see the watch start is white again. 2. The API returns missing pages with ID of 0 and no 'watched' property, which prevents us from knowing if a page has been watched or not. Also it's worth considering what happens if you watch 2 non-existing pages." Essentially the problem we have is we use id's to control watching an article but this doesn't work for new pages which have no id. We will need to rethink this code...
*** Bug 71199 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Change 165398 had a related patch set uploaded by Jdlrobson: Allow watching of missing pages https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/165398
Change 165398 merged by jenkins-bot: Allow watching of missing pages https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/165398
