-------------------------------------------------- From: "Chad" innocentkiller@gmail.com Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 4:18 PM To: "Happy-melon" happy-melon@live.com; "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Hiding Special:UnwatchedPages
On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Happy-melon happy-melon@live.com wrote:
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
Last time I checked, we're a separate project from enwiki (thank god). If we change the software default, we're certainly free to do so. Just like enwiki is certainly free to request a config change to re-lock it; which I'd expect they'd do.
-Chad
We are indeed, and we can do whatever we like to the software defaults. But changing config settings on WMF wikis is a whole different kettle of fish, and that's what we're really talking about here. Changing things on a whim and then requiring communities to build a consensus **to change them back** is not how we generally approach site configuration.
--HM