Thursday, September 10, 2009

Lurk-o-meter

Wikipedian  MZMcBride recently launched a new tool that reports how many people watchlist a given page.  This has interesting uses.  Word first reached this direction last night.  Today Jehochman's page update served as a reminder (because, of course, I watchlist it).  Wikipedians being what they are, I soon ran a search on Jehochman whose userspace is being watched by 263 people.  Comparison to Jimbo Wales's user talk (1893 watchers) shows that Jehochman's user space receives 13.9% as much attention.

So to coin a unit of measurement, the centijimbo is 1/100th the number of watchers that Jimbo Wales has.  One centijimbo currently equals approximately 19 watchers.  It's a relative measurement so this could alter as people add and drop watchlist pages.

Here's how several prominent Wikipedians measure up:
The two most lurked Wikipedians other than Jimbo himself appear to be JzG and Raul654, who have 525 and 524 watchers respectively.

One might hold interesting debates over what these numbers mean, which factors affect them, or why the Wikipedian with the highest centijimbo rating has a deleted userpage.
----
Juliancolton (13.8 cj) has noted that SlimVirgin measures 32.9 centijimbos.

21 comments:

Alison Cassidy said...

OMG! Mine's 445 users, yet I retired six months ago! :-O

Lise Broer said...

Allie = 23.5cj

MZMcBride said...

Neat post.

Thought I'd mention that it works for non-existent titles as well, so you can see, for example, certain Requests for adminship that are being preemptively watched.

Some of it is pretty interesting.

Joshua said...

Hmm, I have 239 watchers, so I'm at 12.6 cj.

More serious remark: I'm concerned this tool could be used for vandalism. I have some very nefarious ideas that have high BEANS levels.

J.delanoy said...

Hmm. 365...

that's.... 19.3 centijimbos?

Cary said...

I have less than any of you, from what I can tell. 120 watchers. My page is boring.

Tim said...

Dammit, only 183. Must be more controversial in the future.

Anonymous said...

No, Cary; I am the most under-the-radar so far, with a grand total of 33 watchers (1.7cj).

Perhaps this means I'm painfully non-rouge.

Lise Broer said...

The centijimbo seems to be a mixed measure of rougeness, productivity, and popularity. YellowMonkey and Allie, neither of whom are very rouge, both garner a lot of cj's on the lurk-o-meter.

William M. Connolley said...

410. Need more controversy I think :-)

Unknown said...

This would be useful for finding little-watched BLPs.

Unknown said...

52 for me... about 2 1/2 centijimbos...

Anonymous said...

4.2 centijimbos! :-)

David "SirFozzie" Yellope said...

you know, now that I don't do Troubles stuff any more, I think my rating would be in the millijimbos, not centijimbos :)

MZMcBride said...

A little Easter egg: just append &measure=centijimbos

I think I did the math correctly....

Lise Broer said...

That's adorable! Thank you so much. There's a userbox too. :)

Adam C. said...

Isn't that dangerous? I mean, trolls could use it to find poorly-monitored pages.

Lar said...

I think SV may be the most watched I've found so far, she's in the 600s. For ref: 16.2

YellowMonkey said...

Maybe my high ranking is because I respond to requests, or maybe they find my non-PC diatribes entertaining.

Sandy has a high number of watchers. Roger and Kirill surprisingly low given their personal following

YellowMonkey said...

Nish is pretty high-ranking, probably because he gives such prompt CU service. Daniel has a lot, from OTRS I guess and all the paperwork.

Alison was a cult figure, for whatever reasons

YellowMonkey said...

Less than 10% of my talk page posts are about FAR, so I don't think that is the reason

The WR favourites rank very high

JzG, Raul, SV, Jayjg etc