Andrea Forte wrote: It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.

On 12/13/05, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote: One of the drawbacks is that vandals would be able to target articles that have zero users watching them.

G'day Mark, ["X users watchlisted this article" feature] How often do you check your watchlist and find that something survived through RC patrol? How often do you RC patrol and find yourself despairing as too many edits scroll past for you to check out everything? If a vandal knows an article isn't being watched, he'd be quite correct to assume his vandalism would stay on Wikipedia longer than if he'd taken an article watchlisted by 600 people. RC patrol is a worn-out net with many holes in it: sometimes it catches enough, sometimes it doesn't. -- Mark Gallagher "What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!" - Danger Mouse -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.371 / Virus Database: 267.13.13/198 - Release Date: 12/12/2005 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Well, a quick rule-of-thumb is that if we were to spread the 850,000 articles on en: out over the 600-or-so admins, that would make for 1400-or-so items to be added to each watchlist. If the # of regular RC watchers is, say, 5x the number of admins, that would become a more reasonable 280.

I recently purged my watchlist down to 2200 items. It's back up to 2300 a few days later. Of course, it's the same hundred or so articles that keep popping up, a smaller subset that keep getting vandalised. I understand why Evolution gets vandalised constantly. I am clueless as to why Deforestation gets vandalised all the time. A few hundred extra articles wouldn't be a big deal. Ian (Guettarda) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

As a side note, my favorite "always vandalized though no idea why" article is [[Gold foil experiment]]. But perhaps the school-project approach is why.

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee <johnleemk(a)gawab.com> wrote: Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view (otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times. Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is *actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page, kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached. -- [[User:Sherool]] _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons.

Consider running a query on a local installation: (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_queries) or running a query at http://www.wikisign.org/ (although this uses slightly out of date dumps), and then posting the results to somewhere like [[Wikipedia:Most watched pages]] or [[Wikipedia:Least watched pages]].