I agree on the "neat project". Probably you already know but I write it anyway just in case that the API gives you a way of knowing how many (but not which users) follow a certain page. For example the following link http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/watcher/?db=enwiki_p&titles=September_1... will tell you that these pages are followed by X people September 11 attacks 1314 Palestine 360 Israel 1164 Sex 965 Homepage 51 Wikipedia 3303 Main Page 68347 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull 96
I guess you can assume it as an indication of global interest, of course, unfortunately this does not solve your problem of knowing individual interests ;(
P.
On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 7:41 PM, James Howison james@howison.name wrote:
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.
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