Wikipedia talk:Special:UnwatchedPages

Related Changes

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Task T15063

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

What about an option to store them to a page that can be viewed using the related changes feature? That way, you can still have your personal watchlist that you care about, and also watch these millions of pages. Thoughts? -Mysekurity 07:03, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Second. Having admins add 100+ pages to their watchlist just doesn't scale. — Ambush Commander^(Talk) 03:35, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

Absolutly. I would watch even more pages if I didn't have to weed through them to see my "really important" ones. On a somewhat related not, are we ever going to get to see what comes after the first 1000? I for one would like to know if Yukon is watched...or even Advertise- Trevor MacInnis (Talk | Contribs) 05:24, 19 January 2006 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

(Merged with much earlier section with the same name.02:43, 15 April 2012 (UTC))

Here's an idea. I'd have to look into the actual technical implementation, but there must be a way to make this list work with Related Changes. That way anyone with an interest in checking these pages can simply pull up the list whenever they want, and there's little if any security concerns.
— V = IR (Talk • Contribs) 02:40, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

As an aside, to answer that earlier question from 2006, Yukon has 106 watchers at the moment. waggers (talk) 15:10, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

117. Respectfully, Tiyang (talk) 11:00, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

RfC: Visibility of the special page

Should non-admins be given the right to access the Special:UnwatchedPages special page and if so, which ones? smtchahal^talk 08:34, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

There already has been a discussion about a year ago regarding the visibility of this special page, and although the majority of users (though not very numerous) were in support of allowing non-admins to view it, it wasn't clear exactly which ones and the change was hence never implemented. I thought I should bring it up, because I personally believe that the visibility of this page is that big deal. Of course that doesn't mean everyone should have access to it; there could be a separate user right flag the members of which could access this special page, or maybe rollbackers and/or account creators could be given this right by default. smtchahal^talk 08:35, 27 May 2013 (UTC)

• Support - This was one of the reasons I wanted the admin tools was to help support some of the special pages that non admins cannot see. So if this was a user right, that would allow people to see these, then that would be one less reason to need to go through RFA again in a couple months. I don't think it should be totally public because there is a lot of room for abuse but it could and should be a user right like Rollback or File mover. Kumioko (talk) 15:53, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose - the work needed to create and manage another user right isnt' justified by any benefit of allowing non-admins to see this page - especially given the 1000 article limit that's been discussed many times on this page. This page really isn't all that useful. Creating a whole process just so that non admins can view the page, discover that for themselves, and then get on with their lives is unnecessary. Trust me: it just isn't worth it. WaggersTALK 07:58, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I do agree creating a separate user flag just for this special page isn't justified. How about giving the right to existent user flag members, like rollbackers? Rollback is apparently somewhat a big deal, and it does seem relevant here; a user with a good knowledge of what vandalism is and what's not and can be trusted with rollback should also be trusted with this special page, right? This page may not be useful for preventing vandalism, but it can be useful for improving pages that are not bothered about. Whatever it is, I still strongly believe that this page – useful or not – should not be accessible to administrators alone, because administrators apparently don't have much use for it. Besides, how is this page useless if it is also a potential target of abuse (to the point that only administrators are allowed to view it)? smtchahal^talk 08:22, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I could support giving access to rollbackers. To answer that last question - the page would be extremely useful to vandals to see for obvious reasons - that's why it's restricted. But as it stands it's less useful to constructive editors. If the unwatched pages could be categorised somehow, and of course if we could see the full list, it would be much more so. WaggersTALK 08:48, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

I guess that if even rollbackers (there are over four thousands of them; that's about four times the number of administrators) were allowed to view this page, there could be fewer unwatched pages and hence more unwatched pages available to be viewed. smtchahal^talk 09:03, 28 May 2013 (UTC)

• I would support moves to open this page up to more editors. I think that the 1000-item comment is missing the point; it's a display limit, not an absolute limit on how many unwatched articles can ever be known. If I took 1000 unwatched pages and added them to my watchlist, subsequent viewers of this page would see different pages listed here, and most importantly there would be 1000 fewer unwatched pages. bobrayner (talk) 22:53, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
• Support as long as it is limited to an existing class of editors like rollbackers (do not make a new class just for this). I just checked and the 1000 article list only goes as far as articles beginning with "197..." Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:01, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
• Support for rollbackers. No point creating a new right. AIRcorn (talk) 11:15, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
• Support for rollbackers (or a similar group, whatever), but I do believe this is pointless. I don't believe that the 1000-item display list will ever be whittled to the point where anyone can see even all said articles beginning with A, and perhaps, it'll never even get to the point where we can see the first such entry. It's my recollection that watchlists start getting unusable around 10,000 entries.... --j⚛e decker^talk 20:25, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Mine's at 13,000. Do you mind if I opt out? --Redrose64 (talk) 20:41, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

I have a little under 22, 000! Kumioko (talk) 20:43, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Wow! Okay, I've kept paring mine back to 9,000 or so every time it got near 10K. I stand corrected! RedRose... I don't think anyone was suggesting that anyone have to look at the special pages, or change their watchlist. Maybe I'm just being confused, that happens a lot.  :) --j⚛e decker^talk 21:39, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

Well, Bobrayner did put "If I took 1000 unwatched pages and added them to my watchlist ...". --Redrose64 (talk) 21:45, 30 May 2013 (UTC)

How on earth can one have a watchlist that big? When would one sleep? Herostratus (talk) 04:53, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

My watchlist currently covers 3556 pages. These are mostly pages vulnerable to neutrality problems so they have have a modest level of activity. Pages which haven't yet acquired any watchers are likely to be much quieter (I suspect many of them will be rote-created articles about obscure villages and retired sportspeople &c) so 1000 of these wouldn't make much difference to my watchlist workload. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Bobrayner (talk • contribs) 10:58, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

• Jeez, one result of this would be for some people at Wikipediocracy or 4chan or wherever to get whatever right is necessary to access this page and publicize it among their buddies. This would be a vandal's or troll's dream would it not? (Of course, Wikipediocracy may already have some admin accounts, so maybe this wouldn't matter. (As a practical matter, I'd like to see this list so I could take some articles off it.) Herostratus (talk) 04:53, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

• I can think of at least one way to abuse this special pages in a very bad manner. --Enric Naval (talk) 10:50, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

• Yes; we have to balance that against the abuse of unwatched pages in a very bad manner, which is an ongoing problem. Recent changes patrol &c is a fairly effective control but doesn't catch 100% of abuse; watchlists are better at catching abuse but don't cover 100% of articles; increasing the reach of the latter control would widen a different vulnerability (which already exists; it's not new). We have to make a decision on the margin. Personally, I think that opening up this list a bit more would be a net positive as long as we still have reasonably high standards for who can see it. bobrayner (talk) 18:38, 8 June 2013 (UTC)

• Support I can see the benefit of having another group of users being able to access this list because it will lighten the load on the admins. -- MisterShiney ✉ 17:03, 4 June 2013 (UTC)
• Support per Ruhrfisch. If the list is that long, clearly it's grown beyond the control of the admins. I don't want to open up opportunities for vandals, but I would guess the more clever nefarious characters have already gained access. It's high time we sweep out the cobwebs. Chris Troutman (talk) 04:01, 7 June 2013 (UTC)
• Comment: I have 2508 main space article names in my Watchlist, but I'm not watching them! My first "watch list" is the articles in my most recent 500 contributions since changed by someone other than me. I think we need a better definition of unwatched: specifically pages edited by IPs and other possible vandals (always assuming good faith), that have not been automatically reverted by bots, that have not been viewed by N logged-in users (not including possible vandal accounts) where N may vary on the size of the article. Mark Hurd (talk) 04:13, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

  That might not be a helpful definition, since listing articles according to those criteria would require a great deal of complexity and technical change, whilst we already have an existing resource which shows all pages that aren't watchlisted. Perhaps, if you're not actually watchlisting them, it would be better to remove articles from your watchlist rather than reëngineer wikipedia to suit a new definition of watchlisting which isn't actually based on watchlists? bobrayner (talk) 12:26, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

  You may be right that I should consider removing my watchlist, but what about all the other editors that haven't checked their watchlists, as mentioned by Ruhrfisch below. An updated version of this page should at least consider only counting watchlists that have been checked recently... Mark Hurd (talk) 02:09, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

  It would be nice if that became technically possible, but in the meantime we don't need this to be an absolutely watertight control; if we reject improved controls whilst waiting for a perfect control, there's something very wrong with our approach to risk. Our other controls have their own gaps - for instance, there's no guarantee that every recent change is seen by an RC patroller, let alone that they understand what they're looking at - but we can live with that because we have multiple, overlapping controls which collectively do a good job of reducing the risk of malicious edits. Watchlists are already a good line of defence; not perfect, but good, and this proposal would narrow the gap by reducing the number of pages which are not effectively watchlisted. bobrayner (talk) 10:39, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

  Users watching pages aren't always active indeed, but this also duplicates work. There is no good way to have an effective patrolling system without a way for 'trusted' users to manually mark an edit as patrolled and having a list of unpatrolled pages (never patrolled) and oldpatrolled pages (previously patrolled, but not the most recent edit), as suggested at WP:Patrolled revisions. Unfortunately, this would need development. Cenarium (talk) 02:53, 29 June 2013 (UTC)

• Comments There has been no technical support for this page in the 5+ years I have been an admin (and no real progress on the Bugzilla requests I filed either). This page is currently of little use because only the first 1000 unwatched articles are listed. I just checked the edit histories of 5 random articles from this list. None had any edits marked as reverting vandalism (human or bot) and only one was above what I would consider stub level - all had edit histories that displayed in one page (and I only looked at the edit summaries, nit the actual edits). One suggestion that has been made here in the past is to make a special account that is just to monitor these unwatched articles. Another observation is that an article may be on the watchlist of one user who has not edited in many years, but will not show up here. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 13:09, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

I would also suggest that this list probably contains some redirects and Disambig pages that need not be on there. Perhaps someone can do some investigation into that? Kumioko (talk) 02:30, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

No, redirects and disambiguation pages need watching too: more savvy vandalism can be hidden in those for much longer if they're not watched. Mark Hurd (talk) 03:11, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Good point, thanks for checking. Kumioko (talk) 03:29, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

I checked and seven of the first 500 entries have the word "disambiguation" in the title. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:35, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

• Question What are the reason(s) to not just give access to everyone? CombatWombat42 (talk) 02:35, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
  • Because if anyone could see this, it would be a list of pages that would be fairly "safe" to vandalize. Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 03:35, 13 June 2013 (UTC)
• Oppose. It's useless in its current form (according to the admins that have it), but a nefarious account or 2 with just "rollback" permissions could easily start adding 1,000 items at a time to his own watchlist, until tens of thousands of items are mischievously removed from this potentially useful feature. –Quiddity (talk) 21:45, 14 June 2013 (UTC)

That's a point, but I guess it's reasonable to expect rollbackers not to do that (because rollback right is apparently taken quite seriously). smtchahal^talk 09:56, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

• This will be a hugely unpopular position, but I think the page should be open to everyone, completely unrestricted. I'm surprised at the number of people here advocating security through obscurity. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 20:31, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

• User access controls are not quite the same thing as "security through obscurity"; they're just "security". bobrayner (talk) 21:51, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

• Yes, I can see that argument; it's something that I considered. The problem I have is that we're assuming that hiding information makes these pages more secure. It may very well do so, but having an army of anti-vandals with access to the information would undoubtedly help, too. However, since Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy, I doubt that we'll ever find out. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 01:40, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

• Once someone adds one of these articles to their watchlist, it disappears from this page the next time it is updated (so the "army of anti-vandals" would no longer have access to the same information). This means a patient vandal who had access to the list could add many of these articles to their watchlist, then wait for the list to be updated, and then essentially have free license to vandalize (as long as they did not make edits of the kind that one of the bots catches). While many of these articles are low traffic, there are some that I assume vandals would love to know they could mess up with slight chance of detection. Ruhrfisch _><>°^°

• There is a risk that a patient and subtle vandal could gain access to this list and have the same "free license" that every editor currently has - that is to say, they're still at risk of getting caught by RC patrol &c. (And once one suspicious edit is caught, past contribs get investigated too, so long-term accounts have rarely been responsible for much vandalism). I think this risk is outweighed by the benefit of genuine watchlisting by a much larger number of editors. bobrayner (talk) 03:11, 28 June 2013 (UTC)

• Support for rollbackers per Ruhrfisch etc.. However, I suspect that the list is so huge its not going to make a lot of difference. It is indeed all but useless at present and none of the various technical solutions proposed over the last 5 years have ever been actioned. Ben MacDui 12:53, 23 June 2013 (UTC)
• Support for rollbackers. Glad I read the Signpost this week. With the number of unwatched pages we have on this wiki, more people having the ability to know this and keep an eye on them is exactly what we need. TCN7JM 22:37, 27 June 2013 (UTC)

Yet another opening proposal

How about this: The UnwatchedPages itself is only visible to admins, but rollbackers can request visibility for pages relating to a certain topic (i.e. relating to their WikiProjects). Looking through the discussions above, I've seen a lot of back-and-forth about this issue, but it seems like a restricted opening would really help to lessen the load and this idea hasn't been tried yet. _{Course, then the issue would be knowledge of this page (which I only found through the Counter-Vandalism Unit), but that seems like a minor one compared to the others.} Supernerd11 :D Firemind ^_^ Pokedex 00:23, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Alas, I think that could be difficult to implement, because the underlying data is just a flat list of pages - it's not a table with columns for category, wikiproject &c. So, how would Special:UnwatchedPages know which ones to show you? bobrayner (talk) 00:32, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

@Kevin Gorman, Anna Frodesiak, Materialscientist, and Kudpung: First, the earlier proposal (unwatched pages should be opened to rollbackers) RfC was never closed although a bot removed the RfC banner, so I would posit that the consensus supported such devolution of admin powers. Second, I supported that proposal and would support any proposal that lowered our potential vulnerability. Finally, the one snag is that even if you went through manually to determine which articles belonged in which WikiProject, I'm not sure all those unwatched pages belong in a WikiProject and many WikiProjects have been only semi-active or completely inactive since users started leaving in 2009. (For example, you might have a AfD discussion that is unwatched, doesn't have an identified WikiProject, or falls into a WikiProject like History that's dying a slow death.) Chris Troutman (talk) 00:52, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

• I think Bob and Chris both raise good points re: the feasibility of making it Wikiproject-specific. Both previous proposals did have pretty strong support amongst those who commented, but didn't receive very many comments for a proposal that involved devolving admin powers, and are both stale enough that I at least wouldn't want to try to close one as successful. From a practical standpoint: this isn't currently a very useful page, and would require something approaching a complete rebuild in order to become useful - unless the Foundation or a volunteer dev wanted to pick up supporting it, I don't think there's much point in debating whether or not we should devolve it to rollbackers - it's just too useless to be worth the words spent discussing it. To give you an idea, currently the last unwatched page you can see is 1961_Wilkes_200 - it doesn't even extend the list far enough to see pages that don't start with a number. Kevin Gorman (talk) 01:32, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

The sad truth is that this page itself lists only 1000 entries and does not even get to unwatched pages starting with the letter "A". There is no interest in the part of the developers and powers that be in making this easier to use (there has been a Bugzilla request in to fix it somehow for years and years). Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 01:35, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

That is a separate problem. It would be good if we could fix list depth or allow people to start at an arbitrary point in the alphabet; it would also be good if we could let a wider range of trusted editors access the list. It would be even better if we could do both, but they are separate problems, and the existence of one is not a reason to avoid solving the other. bobrayner (talk) 01:43, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

What about implementing a search function for just the UnwatchedPages, like WP:AFC's got? At least some that are later in the alphabet (or in the alphabet at all) could be put on a watchlist, if only found by dumb luck. Supernerd11 :D Firemind ^_^ Pokedex 01:53, 28 March 2014 (UTC)

Counting entries

See Wikipedia:VPT#Number of unwatched pages – Philosopher ^{Let us reason together.} 23:31, 15 December 2014 (UTC)

How does this work?

What's the metric for counting a page as "unwatched"? Zero total watchers? Zero active-editor watchers? Or some threshold low number of watchers?

And why can I see only the first 5000 of these articles? I am sure there are more, because #5000 has a title starting with the character "1" just like the 4999 before it. ~Anachronist (talk) 23:45, 12 October 2017 (UTC)