On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Happy-melon <[email protected]> wrote: > 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" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:[email protected]... >> On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Aryeh Gregor >> <[email protected]> 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 >>> [email protected] >>> 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 >> [email protected] >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l >
Last time I checked, we're a separate project from enwiki (thank god). If we change the software default, we're certainly free to do so. Just like enwiki is certainly free to request a config change to re-lock it; which I'd expect they'd do. -Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
