How many watchlisters a page has is a sensitive issue, we've already had
one incident where a "researcher" acquired a list of unwatched pages for a
vandalism experiment.
However anyone who watches a page will also have that pages talkpage on
their watchlist, so while you can't directly contact everyone who has that
page on their watchlist you could conceivably attract the attention of some
of them by a message on its talkpage. But if you were doing more than one
or two of them you would need your note to be very relevant to the
watchlisters of that page.
Regards
Jonathan
On 31 December 2013 10:36, Brian Keegan <b.kee...@neu.edu> wrote:
> Check out Michael Kummer's paper that looks at a similar topic
> ("contagion" in pageviews among linked articles) from an econometrics
> perspective: "Spillovers in Networks of User Generated Content – Evidence
> from 23 Natural Experiments on Wikipedia"
>
> http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2356199
>
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 30, 2013 at 9:42 PM, Kerry Raymond <kerry.raym...@gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> No, you can’t for reasons on privacy. See:
>>
>>
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Watching_pages#Privacy
>>
>>
>>
>> But, I concur with your theory that edits are contagious. I often find
>> that when I get the notification that a watched page has changed, I go and
>> look at the page. While I am there, I often spot a “little thing that needs
>> doing”, which sometimes is just a simple single edit and other times
>> initiates a marathon of editing activity for the next couple of days J
>>
>>
>>
>> If you want to test this theory, I think using at the set of editors of
>> the page might be a pretty good approximation of the watchlist. A lot of
>> people have the “add the pages and files I edit to my watchlist” set in
>> their preferences (I know I do).
>>
>>
>>
>> For the purpose of declaring one edit as being contagious (that is,
>> causes another edit), what criteria would you use? I would assume you need
>> some time bounds here. I think there needs to be “kick-off” edits
>> identified. These would be edits that occurred sufficiently long after the
>> previous edit that contagion could not be factor. Then after the kick-off
>> edit, you would be looking for one or more “reaction” edits that occurred
>> fairly quickly after one another, suggesting a contagion based on
>> watchlists. So it seems there are two time parameters: the kick-off
>> threshold and the reaction threshold. I don’t think these are necessarily
>> the same value (i.e. is there is some grey zone in-between where the edits
>> can be categorised as neither kick-off nor reaction?).
>>
>>
>>
>> In terms of setting these threshold(s), you might need some real-life
>> data to train on. So maybe you could start by asking if some editors would
>> send you a copy of their watchlist and you could write a script that
>> compared it with their edit history over the same time frame (plus a bit to
>> cater for bursty-ness). From that you could come up with a set of edits
>> that look like contagious ones and you could ask the editors to say “yes /
>> no / don’t remember” to try to see if 1) contagion appears to be happening
>> 2) what the time thresholds need to be. Then test it on a bigger set of
>> data using edit history as a proxy for watchlists.
>>
>>
>>
>> Kerry
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> *From:* wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:
>> wiki-research-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] *On Behalf Of *Klein,Max
>> *Sent:* Tuesday, 31 December 2013 2:26 PM
>> *To:* wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> *Subject:* [Wiki-research-l] Polling the watcher's of a page. Possible?
>>
>>
>>
>> Hello Research,
>>
>> It it possible to query for the watchers of a page? It does not seem to
>> be in the API, nor is the "watchers" or "wl_user" table in the Data Base
>> replicas (where I thought MediaWiki stores it. I imagine this is for
>> privacy reasons, correct? If so, how would one gain access?
>>
>> I have been talking with an "econophysicist" who thinks that we could
>> apply a "contagion" algorithm, to see which edits are "contagious". (I met
>> this econopyhicist at the Berkeley Data Science Faire at which Wikimedia
>> Analytics presented, so it was worth it in the end).
>>
>> Maximilian Klein
>> Wikipedian in Residence, OCLC
>> +17074787023
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Wiki-research-l mailing list
>> Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.
> Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Lazer Lab
> College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Northeastern University
> Fellow, Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences, Harvard University
> Affiliate, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
>
> b.kee...@neu.edu
> www.brianckeegan.com
> M: 617.803.6971
> O: 617.373.7200
> Skype: bckeegan
>
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