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