G'day Mark,
On 12/13/05, Carbonite carbonite.wp@gmail.com wrote:
["X users watchlisted this article" feature]
One of the drawbacks is that vandals would be able to target articles that have zero users watching them.
That's not true. An article with zero watchers still shows up on Recent Changes, where anyone doing RC patrol can see what's happening.
How often do you check your watchlist and find that something survived through RC patrol? How often do you RC patrol and find yourself despairing as too many edits scroll past for you to check out everything?
If a vandal knows an article isn't being watched, he'd be quite correct to assume his vandalism would stay on Wikipedia longer than if he'd taken an article watchlisted by 600 people. RC patrol is a worn-out net with many holes in it: sometimes it catches enough, sometimes it doesn't.