Hello, I found out (at german wiki) that in the 'special:preferences' is a 'translation error', but I looked at meta, and found the same missleading sentence.
The Option 'Number of titles in recent changes:' (technically modifing $wpRecent/$rclimit) is affecting more than 'recent changes'. It affects all (?) generated lists.
This messages has a cc to wikipedia-l, if other languages will think about a better 'translation' for their wiki's, too.
Smurf