Wantlists

A wantlist is a record that enumerates items a person or organization desires to obtain. It serves to identify gaps in a collection, plan purchases, or coordinate trades, exchanges, or acquisitions. Wantlists can be private personal lists or shared among groups such as clubs, libraries, or online communities. They may include item identifiers, descriptions, desired quantities, price targets, priorities, notes, and links to sources.

In everyday use, many people maintain shopping or gift wantlists to guide purchases or suggest items for others to gift. Collectors and traders often publish wantlists to signal missing pieces of a set, editions, or variants, and to make barter or sale arrangements easier.

In professional settings, libraries, museums, and other repositories maintain wantlists or acquisition wishlists to track materials they would like to obtain and to manage outreach to suppliers or donors. Public-facing wantlists can also help volunteers or patrons propose items.

In digital and network contexts, a wantlist can refer to a data structure used by distributed systems to request data from peers. For example, in the IPFS Bitswap protocol, a wantlist is the set of data blocks (identified by content IDs, or CIDs) that a node wishes to receive. The list is dynamic and used to prioritize fetching blocks and coordinating with peers, and entries can be added, updated, or canceled as needs evolve.

Privacy and data portability considerations apply to wantlists, especially when publicly visible. Users may choose to keep lists private or control who can view or contribute. Wantlists can usually be exported or imported for interoperability. See also: wish list, registry, collection management, IPFS Bitswap.