Last modified: 2014-11-04 22:50:28 UTC
Add an "active watchers" count to MediaWiki's info action. Not quite sure how we'd do this, but it seems potentially useful. On older wikis, the number of page watchers stat can quickly become meaningless without further context (i.e., a number in a vacuum doesn't mean much). If we limited the count to "active" users (defined by having made an edit or action in the past 30 days, I suppose), it might be more helpful. From a suggestion here: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:MZMcBride&oldid=559641049#Number_of_watchers>.
Just for reference: Dispenser's toolserver tool does this, too: https://toolserver.org/~dispenser/cgi-bin/watcher.py?page=de:Wikipedia:Hauptseite
IMO the older the public wiki projects get, the more important this will become.
I was going to file this today, :) I think it's a high-impact feature which should be high priority. I hope it will be rather easy to implement: with [[mw:Manual:$wgShowUpdatedMarker]] enabled, we know exactly what's the last revision each watching user visited. Requirements: * count the "watching watchers", i.e. users with the page in watchlist who visited it in the last 30 days; * add the count as "Number of actual watchers" under "Number of page watchers" in action=info; * hide it if it's lower than 30, unless the user has "unwatchedpages" permission. We can adjust the numbers with later bugs, possibly reusing some config if an appropriate one is found ($wgRCMaxAge is not ok, can be years if one doesn't have database constraints).
@Nemo - If user A is watching page B, I don't think it should matter whether user A has *visited* page B recently. What's important is whether user A is still active at the site, and therefore is likely to notice edits to page B when they show up on via the watchlist. I have many pages in my watchlist that I don't visit, but if they show up in my watchlist I'll check their recent history using popups. Does the software track the last time that each user displayed his/her watchlist?
(In reply to john_of_reading from comment #4) > @Nemo - If user A is watching page B, I don't think it should matter whether > user A has *visited* page B recently. What's important is whether user A is > still active at the site, and therefore is likely to notice edits to page B > when they show up on via the watchlist. Sure. And I think this likelihood correlates to actual visits more. > > I have many pages in my watchlist that I don't visit, but if they show up in > my watchlist I'll check their recent history using popups. And what does this say about the extent to which you notice edits there? There is another bug about making action=history visits count as visits btw. > > Does the software track the last time that each user displayed his/her > watchlist? No.
The problem with counting only people who visited the page in the last 30 days is that many pages aren't edited every 30 days, and thus even though I, as an active user keenly interested in that page, will definitely see each and every change ever made to that page, possibly within minutes, there may have been no reason at all for me to visit that low-traffic, low-edit page in the last year (much less than in the last 30 days). I've got many pages on my watchlist that average one or two edits per year. The fact that they rarely appear in my watchlist does not mean that I would not notice them being edited.
That's easy to fix, step 1 in comment 3 becomes "check recent unvisited edits and if there are some how old/how many they are". We could discuss what's the most sensible filter for 60 more comments but the reality is that, if done, this will be done at first with the simplest filter possible for performance reasons and then improved in later steps.
