Mike Pruden wrote:
It isn't uncommon for the normally active user to
have hundreds, if not thousands, of pages on their watchlist. Then, when somebody makes an
edit that a certain user doesn't agree with, it gets changed or outright reverted.
It's like, at the least, a form of a bunch of "Big Brothers" looking over an
article and, at the worst, an outright form of page ownership.
I have around 8000 pages watchlisted at present. Having a long watchlist
is actually an antidote to thinking you have to "curate" each change.
I've been on the low end on watchlisting pages
myself, but a couple of months ago I decided to "unload" my watchlist, removing
most articles that I have extensively worked on since I came onboard -- going from about
50 pages watched to about fewer than 10 pages watched, only keeping those I'm
monitoring in the short-term.
Personally, I found unloading my watchlist liberating, and I would hope that more would
do the same. There's always that steady stream of vandal-fighters to stomp out any
clear vandalism that pops up. It's hard to explain, but I think it's a good
exercise in assuming good faith that others will make constructive edits in efforts to
improve pages.
The logic is wrong, in that the "pile-up" factor is not the main
issue:
coverage on someone's watchlist at all is the issue. Divide the number
of articles by the number of active Wikipedians and you find that unless
many people have four-figure watchlist lengths there will be plenty not
watched at all. Vandal-fighting via Recent Changes doesn't do badly, but
it's not an exact science (reverting the last edit doesn't get to
clusters of bad edits, and can "cover up" more serious issues), and I
doubt it is equally effective at all times of day. I reset my watchlist
when it hit 30,000 pages (that really was too much), but the problems of
"ownership" and excess reversion are not actually problems about how
much you watch.
Charles