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 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:MZMcBride#Full_e-mail_reply "Chad" <innocentkil...@gmail.com> wrote in message news:5924f50a1001190734m777e6799h4243eebe6e7ea...@mail.gmail.com... > On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Aryeh Gregor > <simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Why do we hide Special:UnwatchedPages from regular users? Unwatched >> pages are something that people should know about so they can be sure >> to watch them. If no one is actively watching a page, it's more >> likely that vandalism will stick around. Yes, vandals and trolls >> could abuse the info, but they could abuse all sorts of other features >> too, and that's not a reason to deny them to legitimate users. If >> there is any such threat, then that will just encourage legitimate >> users to watch the pages, thereby removing them from the list. >> >> So I suggest we set $wgGroupPermissions['*']['unwatchedpages'] = true; >> in DefaultSettings.php. Or maybe 'user' instead of '*', if people >> prefer. Does anyone object? >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Wikitech-l mailing list >> Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >> > > Sounds reasonable to me. There's many more important metrics than > "does at least one account have this article on their watchlist." It's > zero > indication that articles are being actively monitored by interested > parties, > which is really what vandals would want to know. > > -Chad > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
