[Foundation-l] Research assistance

[Andrew Gray]

On 21 January 2012 13:42, James Heilman <jmh649 at gmail.com> wrote:

> While we have a list here
> http://toolserver.org/~tim1357/cgi-bin/wikiproject_watchlist.py?template=WikiProject%20Medicine&order=desc&limit=200&t=0&m=1&b=0&user=&off=0&cat=0&hip=0&q=1
> if multiple edits
> are made to the same page in a single day it only shows the last one. Is it
> possible to get a list of all edits? If should be possible to work with
> this list if another is not available.

This is slightly clumsy, but it works:

Produce a list of all the articles you want to "watch" (which is the
most tricky part of the process) and format them as a long list of
wikilinks. Drop this into a userspace or projectspace page - it should
just be a sea of blue links to individual articles. Then, use "Related
Changes" from the sidebar - this will produce a list of all the edits
made to every article linked. It isn't treated as a watchlist, so it
shows all edits and not just the "top" ones.

One caveat, though - it doesn't handle redirects or pagemoves very
well. You need to make sure the links go direct to the target page,
not via a redirect, or you'll end up watching for changes to the
redirect page; and if a page linked from there is moved, you may miss
any changes to it.

> If I am able to get approval and funding from UBC I am hoping to run a
> second round collecting the same data but with "pending changes" turned on
> for a week on all medical articles. This students would be required to
> handing all pending changes to all medical articles and will be collecting
> the same data as before. This will allow us to determine 1) if pending
> changes affects the numbers of IPs editing 2) if and to what degree pending
> changes reduces the visibility of poor quality content. The proposed

As David says, I fear you may have more trouble getting agreement from
the community! I'd love to see this part of the study done (and make a
small bet as to what the results might be...), but it's going to be a
hard sell. If you're planning to get this running in the summer, you
might want to start the negotiations quite soon...

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk