No, you can’t for reasons on
privacy. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Watching_pages#Privacy
But, I concur with your theory that edits are contagious. I often find
that when I get the notification that a watched page has changed, I go and look
at the page. While I am there, I often spot a “little thing that needs
doing”, which sometimes is just a simple single edit and other times initiates
a marathon of editing activity for the next couple of days J
If you want to test this theory, I think using at the set of editors of
the page might be a pretty good approximation of the watchlist. A lot of people
have the “add the pages and files I edit to my watchlist” set in
their preferences (I know I do).
For the purpose of declaring one edit as being contagious (that is,
causes another edit), what criteria would you use? I would assume you need some
time bounds here. I think there needs to be “kick-off” edits
identified. These would be edits that occurred sufficiently long after the
previous edit that contagion could not be factor. Then after the kick-off edit,
you would be looking for one or more “reaction” edits that occurred
fairly quickly after one another, suggesting a contagion based on watchlists. So
it seems there are two time parameters: the kick-off threshold and the reaction
threshold. I don’t think these are necessarily the same value (i.e. is there
is some grey zone in-between where the edits can be categorised as neither
kick-off nor reaction?).
In terms of setting these threshold(s), you might need some real-life
data to train on. So maybe you could start by asking if some editors would send
you a copy of their watchlist and you could write a script that compared it
with their edit history over the same time frame (plus a bit to cater for
bursty-ness). From that you could come up with a set of edits that look like
contagious ones and you could ask the editors to say “yes / no / don’t
remember” to try to see if 1) contagion appears to be happening 2) what
the time thresholds need to be. Then test it on a bigger set of data using edit
history as a proxy for watchlists.
Kerry
From:
wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Klein,Max
Sent: Tuesday, 31 December 2013
2:26 PM
To:
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Wiki-research-l] Polling
the watcher's of a page. Possible?
Hello
Research,
It it possible to query for the watchers of a page? It does not seem to be in
the API, nor is the "watchers" or "wl_user" table in the
Data Base replicas (where I thought MediaWiki stores it. I imagine this is for
privacy reasons, correct? If so, how would one gain access?
I have been talking with an "econophysicist" who thinks that we could
apply a "contagion" algorithm, to see which edits are
"contagious". (I met this econopyhicist at the Berkeley Data
Science Faire at which Wikimedia Analytics presented, so it was worth it in the
end).
Maximilian Klein
Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
+17074787023