Last modified: 2005-10-04 11:57:58 UTC
It should be possible to see how many users are watching a certain page. Such a feature would be good for spotting vanadlism quickly, as ideally every page will be watched by a large number of people and thus malicious edits can be spotted quickly. If a page is not watched by (m)any users, then users can add it to their own watchlist and keep an eye on it. To prevent vandals hijacking this feature, it should be viewable only by trusted users - i.e. administrators in the current scheme. Perhaps a colour scheme could be used so that on articles with fewer than x users (20 perhaps?) watching, the number is highlighted. To avoid privacy concerns, only the number of users who are watching an article should be viewable not a list of which users. See also [[en:Village pump (proposals)#Who's watching]] for discussion.
This _is_ implemented in my EnotifWiki (users can opt-in or opt-out), see http://www.enotifwiki.org documentation, download links, helpdesk hotpage and live implementation. Remark: as far as I know from Brion and Tim, this is _not_ foreseen to be implemented on Wikipedia due to database and server load caused by extra queries needed for its implementation.
The meta page has a screenshot of my implementation; the number in [ ] shows the number of watching users
While I can see the usefullness in the primary purpose of your mod, I'm not certain that the server-load required for just the watching would be as taxing as all that.
[[en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Articles that are not being watched by anyone]] contains a similar proposal and more comments. I've copied the comments below for convenience: There should be a function to list articles that are not being watched, or being watched by less than x number of people. - Omegatron 00:07, August 15, 2005 (UTC) * Excellent suggestion! -- Samuel Wantman 00:23, 15 August 2005 (UTC) o see bugzilla:3128 - don't forget to vote for it if you want it implemented. Thryduulf 01:16, 15 August 2005 (UTC) * What is the use for the list? The list can also be called "Best pages to vandalize". (SEWilco 02:31, 15 August 2005 (UTC)) Voted. I was thinking more of a "this article is not being watched by anyone. Would you like to take it?" notice when a logged-in user visits such a page. - Omegatron 03:36, August 15, 2005 (UTC) Perfect. And administrators should be able to see the whole list. ~~ N (t/c) 03:48, 15 August 2005 (UTC) Anyone should be able to see the whole list. Superm401 | Talk 03:59, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
just a thought tough it may be too expensive to implement. imo people should only be counted as watching if they have actually checked thier watchlist in the past few days.
I was going to mention the following. I think it is generally lacking that there is not a way you can see how many people are actually watching an article AND out of those have some kind of weighted value rating about their participation. For example, how long ago they editted, how many edits, etc ... This same rating could be used to see what votes are actually credible when voting on an article is happening. For implementation, I was thinking temporary tables maybe with triggers that update periodically or with certain events. Just my two cents. -KiM
Well, I will predict with a fairly high degree of certainty that the following will *not* happen (at least on the large Wikimedia projects): * a full list be made available to all users; it would be an invitation to vandals and spammers ** similarly, the label suggested, if shown to all users (or all logged-in ones, which is much the same), might as well be "this article is not being watched by anyone. Would you like to vandalise it?" - it's pot luck whether a vandal or a helper passes by first * any kind of complex metric attempting to quantify user participation, for use in this or any other feature; it just wouldn't be worth the server time needed to calculate it * any public list of *who* is watching a page, even if available only to admins; if we're sticking to the policy that the watchlist is private (which is the reason for delaying bug 471) then where's the sense in allowing its investigation in reverse? What might be possible: * a list, or an *approximate* label ("less than 20 people are watching", or whatever), visible to *sysops*; remember that this is still quite an inclusive group, but they're pretty sure not to be out to vandalise. Making it a list on a Special: page could also reduce the server-load worries, as the usual caching and query-killing could be implemented, and normal page views would be unaffected. Of course, this is all only my opinion, so I may be proved wrong yet...
If we want to keep it really simple, how about just adding a "Special:Underwatched-pages" page that lists all articles watched by fewer than X people. The value of X should be set per project, 20 or even 30 might be an apropriate figure for the English Wikipedia, but for a smaller langauge like Welsh (cy) or Interlingua (ie) it might end up displaying >90% of the articles and thus be of no value. To save becomming a partial duplicate of Special:Newpages perhaps it should only list articles more than 24 hours old otherwise it will just be cluttered with all the speedy-deletes. If it would help the servers, it need only be updated say once a week. Ideally I'd like this in conjunction with a facility to give a number, or (less preferably) range (e.g. "less than 20", "between 20 and 50", "between 50 and 100", "between 100 and 250", "between 250 and 500", "more than 500". With the ranges again being setable per project) for an individual article. All of these should only be viewable by sysops. Even ignoring privacy concerns, I don't see any benefit in knowing who is watching what - if you want to know whether somebody is watching something or not, ask them. If they don't mind you knowing they'll tell you.
Two thoughts: - I think for the all round users that it might be nice to know if an article is overly watched. I wouldn't want to be editor number 101, if there are 100 active people on that article. "Fighting" for a revert is pointless. - I was thinking if it was not possible to show dummy users as watchers of an article, but I don't know what use that would be. As for my second brain fart, how about assigning each article that is not being watched to at least 3 admins. I know I wouldn't care having some extra articles on my watch list if all I had to do was watch for vandalism, even if I didn't know diddly about the subject. Could be made part of the obligations of an Admin. With that each article would have some watchers, would probably even be an improvement compared to now since there are probably pages that are neglected. -KiM
I think all users should be able to see the range, but no one should be able to see the actual user names. -Superm401
Closing because: 1) DefaultSettings.php /** Show watching users in recent changes, watchlist and page history views */ $wgRCShowWatchingUsers = false; # UPO /** Show watching users in Page views */ $wgPageShowWatchingUsers = false; 2) SpecialUnwatchedpages http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/SpecialUnwatchedpages.php?rev=1.2&sortby=date&view=log 3) Component is MediaWiki > General/Unknown 4) New bugs can be opened for more specific requests
