I notice that the longer I edit the less I use the watchlist, and the less investment I have in my edits. If I'm actively editing I'll use the editing history, and if sourced material has been removed, even years ago, I'll just find it and put it back. Day to day monitoring is kind of a nuisance, essentially whackamole.
Investment in articles varies greatly.
Fred Bauder
Hi all,
I'm working on a study for which I'd like to know more about editors' watchlisting practices. Of course what I'd really like is to know who had what page on their watchlist when, but I understand the obvious privacy issues there. I assume those issues explain why that information is not (AFAIK) available in dumps etc.
I have read some great qualitative pieces which discuss watchlisting [e.g. 1], which are very helpful (please don't hesitate to suggest others), but haven't seen quantitative data, which our study calls for.
Failing exact data, what do we know about the distribution of practices of watchlisting?
Currently my plan is to assume that anyone who has edited an article in the past 6 months has it on their watchlist. Obviously a very corse assumption. If we had any empirical knowledge about these practices then I could use a distribution (e.g. editors have the page on their watchlist at some % chance, altering depending on their number/tenure of editing that page). I also don't have any way to estimate whether someone who has never edited a page has a page on their watchlist (or assuming that some do, whether there's any useful way to guess which pages they are likely to have on their watchlists).
Grateful for any suggestions or reactions,
Thanks, James Howison
[1]: Bryant, S., Forte, A., and Bruckman, A. (2005). Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work, page 10. ACM.
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l