2009/12/10 Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com:
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:UnwatchedPages (visible to admins only, for obvious reasons) has nothing in the list at all, so someone bothers putting stuff on at least one watchlist.
How well it's *actually* watched is, of course, another matter ...
- d.