2008/6/4 Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com:
Most simple vandalism isn't dealt with by watchlists anyway, but by recent changes listings, whether on-wiki, on the IRC feed or through separate tools that monitor these. Having separate articles makes no difference to these methods whatsoever, since they're edit-based and not page-based.
Mmm... yes and no. I have a gut assumption that basically says "the fewer articles, the easier it is to monitor them"; it may not be a very strong connection compared to how it was Back In The Day, but I think the relationship is still there.
As for bots: well, the very reason for their existence is so that they can do the grunt work for us, and updates to large groups of articles is a perfect example of such work.
Listing does have the subtle advantage here that you *know* you're going to get all the entries - with individual articles, it's relatively easy to lose a few in your later updates.
Anyhow, you're supporting my position, I won't argue back too much :-)