Signaling One Another (Wikipedia)

As Wikipedia grew larger, editors found that there were messages and phrases that kept repeating themselves. In response, they came up with a new idea called "templates," which allowed for a shorthand phrase to be expanded into more text. Templates are designated by putting double curly braces {{}} around a word, which will replace it with another chunk of text. For example, typing {{stub}} into an article would, upon saving, actually show a message at the top of the page:

This article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

The {{stub}} template not only adds a caution/help sign to readers, but it also triggers another action—the addition of the article to a "category" for stubs. Wikipedia Categories allow different pages to be placed in one of many different classifications. Stubs in Wikipedia, for example, are put in Category:Stub. This way, anyone clicking on the page [[Category:Stub]] will get a list of all pages in Wikipedia that have been placed in that category. One of the exercises for people looking for some way to contribute to Wikipedia is to start with the list of stubs, and see if they can help expand or fill in any of the articles. This template and categorization system becomes a way for people to signal to one another about the coming and going of new information in Wikipedia.

But how exactly do users pick up on these signals? With so much activity going on in the virtual space, how do users see all this? In the early days of low traffic, or on wikis with a smaller number of users, Cunningham’s recent changes page was the hive of activity. When there were a few edits each minute, users could simply inspect the list of recent changes like an old stock ticker tape, and inspect the changes. By 2008, on the English Wikipedia, there were dozens of edits recorded every second. It would be impossible to track or sift through all these changes by hand.

Instead, this is where the watchlist came into play. The watchlist is a customized list of articles that each user maintains. They might be articles the user is interested in, has edited before, or wants to keep an eye on. Like a filtered recent changes page, the watchlist shows a reverse chronological log of changes but only for the articles the user is interested in. While most people have hundreds of articles they are watching, it’s not unusual for others to have thousands of pages on their list. Any modification to a "watched" page or to the associated talk page will be displayed in a refresh of one’s watchlist.

Wikipedia could not handle millions of articles and edits without the watchlist function. Each user observes an arbitrary portion of the article space with his or her list, with different people redundantly checking and correcting information.

The output of the watchlist is similar to that of recent changes, listing the page name, author of the last edit, and convenient links to leave a note with that editor or to inspect the editor’s contributions. If a user watches the page [[Disc golf]] then any change to [[Talk:Disc golf]] is automatically noted as well, because it is useful to track conversations about certain topics, or with certain users. For each page, there are "diff" and "hist" links, allowing one to show the difference with the previous version or to inspect the entire edit history of the page.

Because the watchlist is packed with so much information and so many links, users can quickly pick up on the environmental changes of other users in the system and act on them. In fact, the number of words that are clickable in the watchlist display far outnumber the ones that are not.

Enhancements were added to the watchlist over the years, such as a number indicating how many bytes (or characters) had been added or removed from the article, in parentheses next to the page name. A large number meant a wholesale change to the article, and when taken with an edit comment like "undid" or "revert," it signaled simply undoing the previous action. Just by glancing at the list, without even doing a "diff," it’s possible to understand the nature of many edits very quickly.

Experienced users have made their watchlist their first stop of the day, browsing the log of changes to search for telltale clues of activity. The watchlist has become an essential tool, a zeitgeist of Wikipedia’s hive of activity custom-made just for the user.