Wikipedia talk:Requests for adminship/Genisock2

Why is Special:Unwatchedpages only available to admins?
I rather agree with Jkelly's comment, so thought I'd kick off discussion! First questions, why actually is the Special:Unwatchedpages list only available to admins? Something about a vandal would add them all to their watchlist to 'hide' them or something? --Petros471 21:54, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * No, because a vandal could use it as a handy list to figure out where he won't be caught vandalizing. &#8212;Cryptic (talk) 22:08, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok thanks for answering. Before I (possibly) support this RfA I would also like see an answer to Liberatore's suggestion (either way with reasons). (edit conflict- looks like Chick Bowen has partially answered that one, but I'd like to see more) --Petros471 22:15, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Geni, question: since this is sort of experimental, would you be willing to submit to a review after a month or so--it wouldn't have to be a formal RFC, we could even conduct it in userspace--in which we could have a roundtable comparison of the sock's contribs logs and a frank discussion about what it's being used for and what it's overall effect was? I think the experiment will go well, but if there were a clear consensus that it weren't, would you be willing to voluntarily desysop the sock? I think all would understand that such discussion would relate only to the experiment itself, not to your overall performance as an admin, which is unquestioned. What do you, and others, think? Chick Bowen 22:12, 3 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Sure no problem. I'm a data fanatic anyway so I would love to see this sort of thing. If it doesn't work it doesn't work. We try something else.Geni 22:21, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Did you ask the developers whether they have a solution to problem, because having another 100 sock administrators might not be a good idea. Dr Debug (Talk) 22:23, 3 February 2006 (UTC)


 * No but the problem of overloaded watchlists is a long running low level one. I am not aware of any developer side solution (the most popular suggestion being multiple watchlists) being in the pipline. I doubt sock admins would be a problem.Geni 22:27, 3 February 2006 (UTC)


 * I think that you can join both tables and have an extra feature "unwatched recent changes" which will be a pretty solution, but if the watchlists is low level problem than maybe a work around is the best way for now, but I prefer a technical solution ;) Dr Debug (Talk) 22:30, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Moved from the project page
(Oppose for now) Seems that the same can be much better achieved by creating a list of articles and using the "related changes" features to monitor them. - Liberatore(T) 21:55, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * That list would have to be visible only to admins, and I don't know how such a thing would be programmed. Chick Bowen 22:11, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell, articles cannot be readable to admins only, so your comment is enterely valid. However, as far as I understand, the list I am proposing to create instead of Geni's sock would be made of unwatched articles but would not contain all of them (that would be 600,000 articles, I think). Once someone is watching these articles, they are not unwatched any more, so the rationale for keeping this list secret is not so strong. If the use of a watchlist is really necessary, I suggest to first try using a normal account and the godmode-light script to see whether the idea is really worthwhile. - Liberatore(T) 22:25, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * It still exists. It is known I'm on GMT. While my sleeping patterns are a little odd it would be quite posible to hit the articles while I was asleep or busy at uni.Geni 22:30, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Since such a list is public, it may also be watched by other users. Beside, you do not need to point out how you are using this list, and I honestly doubt that the average vandal is so smart to find it out. - Liberatore(T) 22:33, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Echo Liberatore. Persistent vandals that have experience won't care much whether an article is watched or not; there's no report to show whether a page is watched or not, and Special:Unwatchedpages only shows the first 1,000 anyways. "Normal" vandals are not going to know about Special:Unwatchedpages. Heck, I'd bet most admins don't know about that resource. --Durin 22:46, 3 February 2006 (UTC)


 * you run into scaleing issues. I think I can watch 5000 low traffic pages but 300K? Buy doing this I make a comitment. I will keep an eye on those 5000 pages for vandalism. But 60 pages with 5000 articles listed? We will never be able to keep track of who is watching what.Geni 22:54, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

It seems possible to do this without admin powers (although it's a tad more complicated) - after opening Special:Unwatchedpages you could log out (from a separate tab), and log in with the other account. The page is still displayed, and you can open the pages in new tabs, add them to your watch list, and they should be added just fine. Of course when I tried that just now User:GuettardaSock was blocked as an abusive sockpuppet, which left me behind the autoblocker :( Guettarda 22:59, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Vesting the protection in one person
I'm not entirely comfortable with the idea of vesting the protection of so many thousands of articles in the hands of just one person within Wikipedia. These might be low traffic articles, I'll grant. But, I think a far better solution is for the developers to create a recent changes list for unwatched articles.

Also, I'll echo what I said in my opposition vote. I think the RfA should be withdrawn, and a discussion allowed to commence with multiple inputs rather than allowing this to inevitably go for 7 days with the only possible conclusion being that we either do not grant the admin rights or a bureaucrat has to contend with whether to allow this groundbreaking move...possibly making such a decision on their own. RfA isn't the forum for this. The mailing list would be one such place, as would Wikipedia talk:Special:Unwatchedpages. The former would be seen by more eyes. RfA is a binary process; yes/no admin. The possible alternatives in this case are very far from binary. An RfA for this sort of request is asking a hammer to do a socket set's job. --Durin 22:53, 3 February 2006 (UTC)


 * You aleady invest the protection of a very high percentage of our articles to only one person. A person who may not be as active as me. You have no choice in this matter. Neither do I. I accept of course that the sock account will have none of the rights normally due to an admin. If it doesn't work or the community doesn't like how it is working it will be trivial to de-admin. The devs are busy people. You want security? If people want I'll turn the account password over to the foundation or some other person they accept to be a fair, unbiased and honest judge. The devs are busy. Bugzilla shows there are many other things that require their time. Perhaphs one day they will come up with a softwear fix. Until then we must work with what we have.Geni 23:08, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't fully understand Durin's objection. I don't think we're given Geni any particular authority or responsibility over the list. Any admin can add any of the articles on the list to their watchlist at any time. All we're doing is allowing him to watch more articles by separating out part of his watchlist to a different account. Right? Chick Bowen 23:30, 3 February 2006 (UTC)
 * A person haivng multiple admin accounts is not a good precedent. And considering Geni's application, it is just not worth the trouble. Oleg Alexandrov (talk) 03:41, 4 February 2006 (UTC)


 * The solutions to the problem of the huge number of unwatched articles lie in both the existing Special:UnwatchedPages and a Special:RelatedChangesforUnwatchedPages, both restricted to admins (or "trusted users", e.g. users who are given the rollback privilege).
 * I do think Geni's idea is an interesting one, and if Special:RelatedChangesforUnwatchedPages isn't viable for some reason (and I can think of some likely technical problems with it), and this admin nomination succeeds, I might create a similar account. I've added several hundred pages from UnwatchedPages to my watchlist so far, and unfortunately I find that some of them have proved to be quite active, although I've seen very little vandalism on any of them. I suppose I could conclude that the active ones have been added to someone's watchlist since I added them to mine and drop them. If they're not on someone else's watchlist, they'll reappear on UnwatchedPages.
 * If Geni's idea is considered a good one, then perhaps we should ask all admins (and users with rollback privileges, if that passes) to volunteer, and their socks will each be allocated 5000 articles automatically. That would be easier than adding pages to the watchlist manually, although the benefit of doing it manually is that you get to check the last edit for vandalism as you go.-gadfium 03:53, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Multiple watchlists
I asked for comments on this at the admins IRC channel, and someone (I don't recall who) came up with the interesting idea that users should be given multiple watchlists.

The way I see this working, is that users be able to set which of a number of watchlists are active at any given time. Pages added to a watchlist then go on the currently active watchlist. A separate screen allows a user to move pages between their watchlist. Either a user could create watchlists via a tab on their preferences menu, in which case changing watchlists would be like chgrp in unix, or they would have a fixed number of watchlists, rather like user area in CP/M. Umm, I'm probably losing my audience talking about a relatively obscure feature of CP/M, aren't I.-gadfium 08:20, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Second watchlist as opposed to subpage of links
Geni suggests in his opening statement on the RfA that he could populate the watchlist of this account with 5,000 articles "in something under a month using the features available in the mediawiki software". Just as a test, I decided to see how long it would take me to create a sub page that had links to the top 500 unwatched articles. Three minutes. That's it. Times 10, that's 30 minutes as opposed to a month. You can see the results for yourself at User:Durin/Unwatched. The last 500 changes to these 500 articles can be seen here.

Geni suggest that such a list allows vandals to readily see what pages are unwatched. With all respect, this argument does not hold water. If such a subpage of links exists, the vandal is finding a list of pages that are, in fact, being watched by Geni. Furthermore, multiple admins could copy the list off such a subpage and we then have multiple admins watching the same pages, as opposed to a single admin. --Durin 15:48, 4 February 2006 (UTC)


 * How do you plan to make this scale to 300k articles?Geni 17:58, 4 February 2006 (UTC)


 * How do you plan to handle a watchlist of 300k articles? --Durin 18:01, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I should probably clarify as the above line most likely seems rather flippant. Are their scalability issues? Perhaps. But, there are scalability issues in your solution as well. This simply points to the need for more discussion on this rather than forcing RfA to handle this issue. RfA isn't the forum for it. --Durin 18:05, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
 * 5000*60 people. Not a mayor problem.Geni 23:03, 4 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Neither is a subpage of links * 60 people. --Durin 03:36, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
 * No way to get special unwatch pages to kick out more than 1000 links unless you put them on a watchlist. Sub pages have the propblem that the indivduals may feel less responcible for them. Again you have the issue of security.Geni 03:40, 5 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Then we are applying a solution that is against a bug fix; instead we should be working on the bug fix. Also, there is no security issue that is solved by your solution vs. that is not solved by mine. First, how many vandals are going to find a subpage that contains such a list? If it's a disconnected subpage, few (if any) vandals would ever find it. Second, what if they did? Since the list exists, then the pages are effectively being watched. --Durin 13:24, 5 February 2006 (UTC)


 * wikipedia long ago gave up on the vandles wont find this page defence. It didn't work out too well. Ever look at special:listuser? People kept saying that the devs do something about the content that is now on page 2. In the end a workaround was less hassel.Geni 15:39, 5 February 2006 (UTC)


 * So what if they find it? IF they find it, they are finding a list of watched pages. --Durin 21:55, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Why pages are not on Special:Unwatchedpages
(please note: I am not criticizing Geni or his intentions) The reason pages are not on Special:Unwatchedpages is generally from one source; the articles not on the list have generated enough interest/concern to be on someone's watchlist. Broadly speaking, the articles not on the list are watched by someone who has some knowledge of the topic of the article. By creating this adminsock, we are effectively creating another reason why pages would not be on the list, but in this case we are asking a user who may have absolutely no knowledge of the topic to decide whether something should be in the article, is inappropriate for the article, or is some form of vandalism. If you don't know much about a given article's topic, you may not recognize something as being legitimate content. Geni's suggesting 5,000 articles. He can't possibly be knowledgeable on all of those topics or even a significant minority of them. --Durin 15:53, 4 February 2006 (UTC)