Cool idea, James! Let's chat about it one of these days if you have time. One problem I would foresee with using the number of accounts watching a page is that you don't know when they last logged in or actually checked their "watched pages" feed - I know I watch quite a few pages but in effect I don't actually check on the changes unless I am expecting a message (that would be, for watched Talk pages). There may be editors who left Wikipedia but they are still listed among the people "watching" a page even when the account is inactive.
As for asking some editors for their lists - I know some people voluntarily expose / make visible their watched lists. As Amy said, that's probably not representative, but would be a start, and they are probably more likely to be willing to talk to you about they watching behavior too.
Good luck. Andreea
-----Original Message----- From: wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Amy Bruckman Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 9:12 PM To: wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] research on watchlist behaviors?
Neat project idea, James!
You can ask for volunteers to share their watchlists, but I don't know how you get a representative sample. But I think it's worth trying since no one has done it as far as I know. And then you just clearly describe your sample as volunteer selected and do some descriptive statistics on it and show how those users compare to known Wikipedia averages.
The database will tell you how many people are watching a page, if it's more than 30. You could compare that to the number of editors of the page.... Well, it's a start.
For what it's worth, I think my watchlisting behavior changed when I switched from the default mode of showing just the last edit for each article to the mode that shows all edits. Stuff that changes too often got unwatched fast. :-) So if you do get volunteers, I'd collect watchlist settings they use.
By the way, I wonder if the recent UI changes (moving from the word "watch" to the star icon for watching a page) may have affected things at all. A mundane but possibly non-trivial factor....
Good luck with it!
-- Amy
On 7/1/10 1:41 PM, James Howison wrote:
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.
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