I assume that you haven't been following the Drama Of The Week on enwiki? In the latest episode, MZMcBride summons down the wrath of the gods by giving a banned editor and prolific Wikipedia critic a list of 20 unwatched biographies; the banned editor uses an army of socks to start a "breaching experiment", vandalising the articles in interesting ways and monitoring how long they remain unreverted; and MZMcBride resigns admin status *again* in the face of a third ArbCom case over the whole issue.
I agree with a lot of MZ's reasoning ([1]) about the uselessness of "number of watchers" as a metric for vandal risk. But this is probably the worst time in the past two years to be thinking about opening up Special:UnwatchedPages.
--HM
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MZMcBride#Full_e-mail_reply
"Chad" innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote in message news:5924f50a1001190734m777e6799h4243eebe6e7ea0c9@mail.gmail.com...
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com wrote:
Why do we hide Special:UnwatchedPages from regular users? Unwatched pages are something that people should know about so they can be sure to watch them. If no one is actively watching a page, it's more likely that vandalism will stick around. Yes, vandals and trolls could abuse the info, but they could abuse all sorts of other features too, and that's not a reason to deny them to legitimate users. If there is any such threat, then that will just encourage legitimate users to watch the pages, thereby removing them from the list.
So I suggest we set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['unwatchedpages'] = true; in DefaultSettings.php. Or maybe 'user' instead of '*', if people prefer. Does anyone object?
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Sounds reasonable to me. There's many more important metrics than "does at least one account have this article on their watchlist." It's zero indication that articles are being actively monitored by interested parties, which is really what vandals would want to know.
-Chad
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l