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
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