Last modified: 2014-11-17 10:35:52 UTC

Wikimedia Bugzilla is closed!

Wikimedia migrated from Bugzilla to Phabricator. Bug reports are handled in Wikimedia Phabricator.
This static website is read-only and for historical purposes. It is not possible to log in and except for displaying bug reports and their history, links might be broken. See T15063, the corresponding Phabricator task for complete and up-to-date bug report information.
Bug 13063 - Special page for recent changes in unwatched articles
Special page for recent changes in unwatched articles
Status: PATCH_TO_REVIEW
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
Special pages (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Normal enhancement with 1 vote (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
: design, patch, patch-reviewed
: 24891 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2008-02-19 04:39 UTC by Ruhrfisch
Modified: 2014-11-17 10:35 UTC (History)
9 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments
Extend RC to support hiding articles that at least one user is already watching (2.04 KB, patch)
2008-08-22 13:46 UTC, Joshua C. Lerner
Details

Description Ruhrfisch 2008-02-19 04:39:16 UTC
On the English Wikipedia, Special:Unwatchedpages is nearly useless because it
only shows the first 1000 articles. User:Random832's suggestion is to make a page for recent changes in unwatched articles, i.e. Special:Recentchangeslinked/Special:Unwatchedpages - at this point, to actually _watch_ them, you'd have to either add all the pages to your watchlist, or make a page with links to all of them (which would disclose the list).

This is related to [https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13062|13062] [https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12272 12272] and
[https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10753 10753].
Comment 1 Joshua C. Lerner 2008-08-22 13:46:00 UTC
Created attachment 5207 [details]
Extend RC to support hiding articles that at least one user is already watching

Tested briefly against 1.14-svn, seems to work. Not sure what the clearest label would be (in [[MediaWiki:Rchidewatched]]).
Comment 2 Plrk 2008-09-23 12:28:16 UTC
will this be implemented in a "live" version?
Comment 3 Joshua C. Lerner 2008-09-23 13:28:52 UTC
(In reply to comment #2)
> will this be implemented in a "live" version?

If we can convince the powers-that-be.
Comment 4 MrZaius 2008-10-05 02:36:05 UTC
I understand this might be a separate bug request - I'd be happy to break it out if you like, but it seems related enough that it would get flagged as a DUPLICATE and ignored on several other bug trackers.

Is it possible to only check the watchlists of active users when limiting Special:RecentChanges? It doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot if an article created and untouched since 2006 was created and watched by a new editor that disappeared at the same time. The ratio of users:active users in Special:Statistics on the en wiki is mind-boggling, and though likely higher than in smaller wikis, still indicative of the overall level of editor loss that wikis experience over time.

Here's some math to sell this, if it's possible to do:

en wiki total to inactive user ratio: 51:1
de wiki total: 26:1
en wiktionary: 93:1 !
(Tried to pull stats on an off-project wiki (WikiTravel), but they must be using an obsolete version of the stats page.)

It seems readily apparent that, on a site like Wiktionary or the en Wiki where we have over 50x more inactive than active users that we don't want to risk looking at the inactive user's watchlists.

Barring any deep familiarity with MediaWiki's code, it seems to me that the tradeoff of having to separate active users from inactive users would be more offset by the number of watchlists you don't have to parse to generate the content mentioned here.
Comment 5 Danny B. 2008-10-05 11:36:21 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)

I know cases when users have second account used only for watchlist and such watchlist is much larger than watchlist on their regular account. If the "active user" was measured not by number of edits but by, say, last login, it could make a sense then.
Comment 6 Alexandre Emsenhuber [IAlex] 2010-08-21 16:14:30 UTC
*** Bug 24891 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 7 BD2412 2010-08-21 16:33:37 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
> *** Bug 24891 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Yes, it is a duplicate. This seems to be an easy implement, let's do it already. Cheers!
Comment 8 Sumana Harihareswara 2011-11-06 14:05:08 UTC
I am so sorry that it has taken so long for anyone to review this patch.  Right now it does not cleanly apply to trunk.  Joshua, do you have time and interest in updating it?  Or perhaps another commenter would like to?
Comment 9 Max Semenik 2011-11-06 14:21:37 UTC
This patch has a few deficiencies:
1) It doesn't take table prefixes into account.
2) It counts the exact number of people watching the page FOR EVERY ROW in result set while you only need to know whether this number is equal to zero or not.
3) Depnding on how much slower are subqueries after (2) is resolved, you may need to go as far as introduce a rc_watched column to cache these results.
Comment 10 Andre Klapper 2013-01-09 13:16:12 UTC
(In reply to comment #8)
> Joshua, do you have time and interest in updating the patch?

Unfortunately no answer, hence resetting assignee to default.
Comment 11 Dennis C. During 2013-07-25 19:38:29 UTC
This would be helpful at English wiktionary to reduce the number of entries that someone would have to scan to find those in their language that were possibly problematic and generally to focus attention on the most neglected entries. ~~~~
Comment 12 Bawolff (Brian Wolff) 2013-07-27 03:19:59 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> 
> Is it possible to only check the watchlists of active users when limiting
> Special:RecentChanges? It doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot if an article
> created and untouched since 2006 was created and watched by a new editor that
> disappeared at the same time. The ratio of users:active users in
> Special:Statistics on the en wiki is mind-boggling, and though likely higher
> than in smaller wikis, still indicative of the overall level of editor loss
> that wikis experience over time.
> 

Interesting idea. Perhaps a join on user_touched. However I imagine that would be too expensive for wikipedia (by expensive I mean has speed issues).

However, for the original idea of Special:UnwatchedChanges. I can't imagine that would be any more expensive than Special:Recentchangeslinked.
Comment 13 Gerrit Notification Bot 2013-07-27 05:38:04 UTC
Change 76238 had a related patch set uploaded by Brian Wolff:
Add Special:UnwatchedChanges page.

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/76238
Comment 14 Bawolff (Brian Wolff) 2013-07-27 05:39:59 UTC
(In reply to comment #13)
> Change 76238 had a related patch set uploaded by Brian Wolff:
> Add Special:UnwatchedChanges page.
> 
> https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/76238

I thought I'd have a go at this. However I should note, the patch I made for this I'm a bit unsure about. I think it would have similar performance characteristics to Special:Recentchangeslinked with a large category.

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.


Navigation
Links