Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.
John Lee ([[User:Johnleemk]])
On 12/13/05, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.
One of the drawbacks is that vandals would be able to target articles that have zero users watching them. It's been suggested that instead of exact counts, ranges would be used for lesser watched articles ("Less than 10 users watching"). Perhaps admins could have access to exact counts so that they could identify if an article wasn't being watched. Overall, it's a very good idea that just needs to have the details nailed down.
Carbonite
True, it would afford more effective vandalizing of unwatched pages. Then again, it would alert readers to be more cautious there too.
Andrea
On 12/13/05, Carbonite carbonite.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.
One of the drawbacks is that vandals would be able to target articles that have zero users watching them. It's been suggested that instead of exact counts, ranges would be used for lesser watched articles ("Less than 10 users watching"). Perhaps admins could have access to exact counts so that they could identify if an article wasn't being watched. Overall, it's a very good idea that just needs to have the details nailed down.
Carbonite _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/13/05, Carbonite carbonite.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 12/13/05, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.
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.
-- Mark Wagner
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.
And, it's an interesting question to me... how many watchers DO articles generally have anyhow? ARE there articles with 600 watchers? 60? Am I diligently watching the same things as 100 others or are we distiburing our observation more evenly over the content of the site?
-andrea
On 12/13/05, Mark Gallagher m.g.gallagher@student.canberra.edu.au wrote:
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.
-- Mark Gallagher "What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse
-- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.371 / Virus Database: 267.13.13/198 - Release Date: 12/12/2005
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
And, it's an interesting question to me... how many watchers DO articles generally have anyhow? ARE there articles with 600 watchers? 60? Am I diligently watching the same things as 100 others or are we distiburing our observation more evenly over the content of the site?
-andrea
Well, a quick rule-of-thumb is that if we were to spread the 850,000 articles on en: out over the 600-or-so admins, that would make for 1400-or-so items to be added to each watchlist.
If the # of regular RC watchers is, say, 5x the number of admins, that would become a more reasonable 280.
-- Neil
Well, a quick rule-of-thumb is that if we were to spread the 850,000 articles on en: out over the 600-or-so admins, that would make for 1400-or-so items to be added to each watchlist.
If the # of regular RC watchers is, say, 5x the number of admins, that would become a more reasonable 280.
I recently purged my watchlist down to 2200 items. It's back up to 2300 a few days later. Of course, it's the same hundred or so articles that keep popping up, a smaller subset that keep getting vandalised. I understand why Evolution gets vandalised constantly. I am clueless as to why Deforestation gets vandalised all the time.
A few hundred extra articles wouldn't be a big deal.
Ian (Guettarda)
On 12/13/05, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Well, a quick rule-of-thumb is that if we were to spread the 850,000 articles on en: out over the 600-or-so admins, that would make for 1400-or-so items to be added to each watchlist.
If the # of regular RC watchers is, say, 5x the number of admins, that would become a more reasonable 280.
I recently purged my watchlist down to 2200 items. It's back up to 2300 a few days later. Of course, it's the same hundred or so articles that keep popping up, a smaller subset that keep getting vandalised. I understand why Evolution gets vandalised constantly. I am clueless as to why Deforestation gets vandalised all the time.
School projects. Like dolly the sheep and egypt.
-- geni
As a side note, my favorite "always vandalized though no idea why" article is [[Gold foil experiment]]. But perhaps the school-project approach is why.
FF
On 12/13/05, Guettarda guettarda@gmail.com wrote:
Well, a quick rule-of-thumb is that if we were to spread the 850,000 articles on en: out over the 600-or-so admins, that would make for 1400-or-so items to be added to each watchlist.
If the # of regular RC watchers is, say, 5x the number of admins, that would become a more reasonable 280.
I recently purged my watchlist down to 2200 items. It's back up to 2300 a few days later. Of course, it's the same hundred or so articles that keep popping up, a smaller subset that keep getting vandalised. I understand why Evolution gets vandalised constantly. I am clueless as to why Deforestation gets vandalised all the time.
A few hundred extra articles wouldn't be a big deal.
Ian (Guettarda) _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On 12/14/05, Fastfission fastfission@gmail.com wrote:
As a side note, my favorite "always vandalized though no idea why" article is [[Gold foil experiment]]. But perhaps the school-project approach is why.
FF
It's second on google and the kind of thing school kids are going to be asked to look up so probably.
-- geni
On 14 Dec 2005, at 00:04, Fastfission wrote:
As a side note, my favorite "always vandalized though no idea why" article is [[Gold foil experiment]]. But perhaps the school-project approach is why.
Check the vandalism history on [[Lentil]]. Is that a school project?
The choices vandals make are odd.
Justinc
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.
Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view (otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.
Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is *actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page, kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached.
Sorry, I think we have a communication break down. Of course when I say "watching" this article, I mean how many people have it on their watch list, not how many people are reading it.
On 12/13/05, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 16:02:29 +0100, John Lee johnleemk@gawab.com wrote:
Andrea Forte wrote:
Has it ever been suggested before that a simple indicator of "how many people are watching this article" could be a useful tool for:
users who want to figure out what to trust wikipedians who want to know where to spend their efforts discouraging vandalism
Has this been tried? Suggested? Debated?
Just curious,
Andrea
It's not exactly new, but I've never figured out why it hasn't been explored further.
Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view (otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.
Aside from that I don't think the feature would be overly usefull. The best you can do is give a count of how many people have loaded the page within the last X minutes, there is no way to actualy tell if anyone is *actualy* viewing the page. I think a more meaningfull number would be the number of active (insert a convenient definition of active here) users have the page on theyr watchlist or something like that, but again you can't stick that on the page itself with the caching eneabled, otherwise it would only update every time someone edited the page (or did an action=purge on it). Maybe it could be put in an asosiated special page, kinda like Special:Whatlinkshere or some such though, they are not cached.
-- [[User:Sherool]]
WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 20:41:52 +0100, Andrea Forte andrea.forte@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry, I think we have a communication break down. Of course when I say "watching" this article, I mean how many people have it on their watch list, not how many people are reading it.>
Yeah I see that now, my bad. That's what you get for reading the mailing list while half-asleep (while I rely ought to be programming the "test case" I'm due to hand over to a potential employer by tomorow) :P
On 13/12/05, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons.
I think you're confusing "viewing" with "watching" - you are absolutely right that monitoring page *views* would be very hard, very expensive, and of little value. But by "watching" what is meant is the number of people on whose "watchlist" the page is; this would be fairly easy to determine from the database (we already store everyone's watchlists, obviously) and changes fairly rarely, so that maybe caches could be invalidated when pages were watched/unwatched, or maybe the count becoming "stale" wouldn't be such a problem [especially if it was only ever a ball-park figure].
Meanwhile, I think a version of this may actually *already be implemented* in the software, but switched off on Wikimedia sites, probably for performance reasons. See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727 and http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3128
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]
On 12/14/05, Rowan Collins rowan.collins@gmail.com wrote:
Meanwhile, I think a version of this may actually *already be implemented* in the software, but switched off on Wikimedia sites, probably for performance reasons. See http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727 and http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3128
Consider running a query on a local installation: (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_queries) or running a query at http://www.wikisign.org/ (although this uses slightly out of date dumps), and then posting the results to somewhere like [[Wikipedia:Most watched pages]] or [[Wikipedia:Least watched pages]].
Doing it live would be very resource intensive, this way would not use the wikimedia servers at all, and would be reasonably accurate (depending on the frequency of updates).
-- Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com
On 13/12/05, Stephen Bain stephen.bain@gmail.com wrote:
Consider running a query on a local installation: (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_queries) or running a query at http://www.wikisign.org/ (although this uses slightly out of date dumps), and then posting the results to somewhere like [[Wikipedia:Most watched pages]] or [[Wikipedia:Least watched pages]].
I don't think the database dumps include identifiable watchlist records, do they? If they do, that does seem a little... potentially embarassing. You'd need to run it on "the real copy", I'd have thought.
-- - Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
On 12/13/05, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
Main reason I believe is that page view logging is disabled for performance reasons. The only way to get such a feature to work would be to generate every page on the fly from the database on every view (otherwise the count would be out of date). As it is pages are cached by any number of Squid servers so the main database server have absolutely no idea how many people are watching any given page at any given time. If the caching was turned off the server(s) would probably outright die from overwork pretty much right away, it can barely cope as it is at peak times.
Why would it need to be calculated on the fly? Every time someone hits watch, it adds one to the article's counter in some table. Every time they hit unwatch, it removes one. True, you'd need to run some sort of one-time update the first time around (or it could calculate it on the fly once if a null value was found) but after that, barring database errors, it would stay up to date, yes? Unless I am missing something about the way the database works.
FF