Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Archive/Watch particular user edits
Watch particular user edits
Declined in a previous survey
- Problem:
A need for persistent watching of suspected user or IP edits, so you can check them in real time instead of remembering all the addresses and reaching the contribution pages from time to time.
- Who would benefit:
Patrollers and admins. The feature will not be available for users that are not patrollers.
- Proposed solution:
Adding all their edits to your watchlist, they are spread among all others there. Bolded like any other edit, until you have opened the diff page. To add or remove a user, click on the regular star on the user page or on the user talk page, which will not only bring you revisions to these pages, but also the user's own edits. So that you do not get millions of edits you do not need, and so that there will not be conflicts in the community, only users who are not autopatrolled will enter the list, because there is no point in checking the rest, that is, only new registered and anonymous. On the watchlist page itself, along with the rest of the filters, a filter will be set to show and hide user edits that I watch so that anyone who wants to can distinguish. And this filter will also appear in preferences, for persistent setting. These user names, or IP numbers, will have a new CSS class, so you can write a simple gadget that changes the formatting of names, or their edits, to anyone who wants to - background color, highlighting etc.
- More comments:
I do not think it's worth creating a special page for these edits instead of incorporating them into the regular watchlist for the following reasons: The first is comfort - if it's somewhere else, we'll be there less than when it's all in the same place. The second - the chance that it will be implemented as a separate page is falling dramatically, because this is a new feature rather than an existing feature expansion. Another reason is technical - the mess for edits to pages you watch done by people you watch at the same time. Where does it belong? What happens if we open the edit by watching people, we have lost all previous edits of this page in the regular watching, the page has already been marked as seen, and there is no way back. That is, it will make us miss a lot of edits in the usual watchlist.
- Phabricator tickets:
- Proposer: IKhitron (talk) 16:11, 11 November 2017 (UTC)
Discussion[edit]
- This was voted into the top 10 in the 2015 survey, investigated by the CommTech team, and determined to be too easily abused by bad actors to be implemented. See also phab:T2470. Anomie (talk) 17:35, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
- Thank you, Anomie. But I do not see in your links something about the restrictions I added exactly to avoid any kind of abuse. The wrong people will not have this feature, and the right people will not have it about their colleagues, only new on anonime users. Don't you think it solves the problem? I can't see any possible abuse using these characteristics. IKhitron (talk) 17:41, 13 November 2017 (UTC)
- Hi IKhitron, we did talk in 2015 about whether we could build this just for admins, and determined that wasn't enough. Here's a quote from the statement we published:
- "We could make this tool available to admins, which was suggested by several people during the survey. However, a lot of vandal fighters and mentors are not administrators. Also, to be honest, as active Wikimedians, we’re aware of many cases where admins have been part of personal conflicts. While the vast majority of trusted users would of course use it in good faith, it would create the perception of admins having a tool that could be used for stalking, which is invisible and inaccessible to other users and beyond their control. We’ve been strongly discouraged from doing this."
- We won't be able to build this feature, so I'm going to archive your proposal. Thanks for participating in the survey. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 01:09, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
- Do you really think that admin can stalk an anonym, DannyH? And it's worse than this admin will delete many articles, something he can do know? Thank you. IKhitron (talk) 01:28, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
- Yes, it's possible that an admin can do something that's unfair. If they delete a lot of articles, that's part of a public log that people can use to raise questions. If an admin follows a new user around and disrupts every edit that they make, that's much harder to track -- an outside person wouldn't see it, but the user that's being targeted definitely would. This feature definitely would be helpful for the majority of people who would use it in good faith. Unfortunately, we know that some people would use it in an unfair way, even admins. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
- I see, DannyH. Thank you. IKhitron (talk) 21:01, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
- Yes, it's possible that an admin can do something that's unfair. If they delete a lot of articles, that's part of a public log that people can use to raise questions. If an admin follows a new user around and disrupts every edit that they make, that's much harder to track -- an outside person wouldn't see it, but the user that's being targeted definitely would. This feature definitely would be helpful for the majority of people who would use it in good faith. Unfortunately, we know that some people would use it in an unfair way, even admins. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
- Do you really think that admin can stalk an anonym, DannyH? And it's worse than this admin will delete many articles, something he can do know? Thank you. IKhitron (talk) 01:28, 14 November 2017 (UTC)
- Hi IKhitron, we did talk in 2015 about whether we could build this just for admins, and determined that wasn't enough. Here's a quote from the statement we published: