I notice that the longer I edit the less I use the watchlist, and the
less investment I have in my edits. If I'm actively editing I'll use the
editing history, and if sourced material has been removed, even years
ago, I'll just find it and put it back. Day to day monitoring is kind of
a nuisance, essentially whackamole.
Investment in articles varies greatly.
Fred Bauder
Hi all,
I'm working on a study for which I'd like to know more about editors'
watchlisting practices. Of course what I'd really like is to know who
had what page on their watchlist when, but I understand the obvious
privacy issues there. I assume those issues explain why that information
is not (AFAIK) available in dumps etc.
I have read some great qualitative pieces which discuss watchlisting
[e.g. 1], which are very helpful (please don't hesitate to suggest
others), but haven't seen quantitative data, which our study calls for.
Failing exact data, what do we know about the distribution of practices
of watchlisting?
Currently my plan is to assume that anyone who has edited an article in
the past 6 months has it on their watchlist. Obviously a very corse
assumption. If we had any empirical knowledge about these practices then
I could use a distribution (e.g. editors have the page on their watchlist
at some % chance, altering depending on their number/tenure of editing
that page). I also don't have any way to estimate whether someone who
has never edited a page has a page on their watchlist (or assuming that
some do, whether there's any useful way to guess which pages they are
likely to have on their watchlists).
Grateful for any suggestions or reactions,
Thanks,
James Howison
[1]: Bryant, S., Forte, A., and Bruckman, A. (2005). Becoming Wikipedian:
transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia.
In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on
Supporting group work, page 10. ACM.
_______________________________________________
Wiki-research-l mailing list
Wiki-research-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l