I found this earlier on the toolserver:
http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/cgi-bin/watcher.py

Apparently it tells you how many people have any given page on their watchlist, but only if it is over thirty so I can't get a figure for most of the articles on my watchlist.

Perhaps MZ could explain what's up with this—I guess the information potentially could be used for good or evil...

There is a short documentation page here: User:MZMcBride/watcher

Initially the tool was able to output the watch count for any page; the Toolserver administrators said that doing so bypassed MediaWiki's security (some discussion of this is on the talk page).

Some of the arguments against such a tool were a bit flimsy in my opinion. The binary watched vs. unwatched metric doesn't account for things like bots or inactive users. And, if you were going to vandalize, personally the number of page views per day is the metric I'd be looking at.

Actually, in my experience vandals tend to prefer highly watched pages. If a troll falls in a forest, does anyone laugh?

Good, evil, or surprise at the number of watchers on my userpages. Really, more than 60 editors need to watch my talk page?

I have a similar number watching MY talk page. God knows why.

My theory is that people forget that you can list and edit your list of watched pages. It tends to collect crusty cruft after a while, including the pages of anybody you ever interacted with-- be the interaction good, bad, or ugly.

216 people are watching my talk page (and my nonexistent user page).

That may be the only hope for the future--those twits, the kind who view Kelly and Milton as "enemies of the project", will end up with so many pages to "watch" that they will be overwhelmed. And start quitting........

It's hard to watch Milton as an enemy of the project when he hasn't divulged his account. And I'm at 122, with pretty solid credentials as a non-enemy, so I don't think your assumption that page-watchery implies McCarthyism is well-founded.

Just curious, was it 71?

This tool came up before regarding Malleus' pending RfA page, which now stands at 53; http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/cgi-bin/w...%20Fatuarum%203

Heck, I have 70 on my User page, and I'm banned.

Keep in mind that the default behavior of the software is to add any page you edit to your watchlist, and talk/non-talk counterparts are bundled together.

Those particular watchers are going to be sorely disappointed, given that they're watching his old (female) Fatuarum username.

By default, isn't any page you edit added to your watch list? It probably just means 60 people have edited your talk page without unchecking a box.

This is not the default behavior unless you make it the default behavior by ticking the box on the user-prefs page. The checkbox starts out false for new accounts.

You can test this by creating a throwaway sock or (if you haz SUL) by going to [[Special:Sitematrix]] and choosing a random wiki you know you've never visited (confirming this may require first setting the user-interface language to something you can read).

I did one of these things just now to check and be sure.

Slightly off-topic, while I was there also noticed there is now a "public watchlist" feature of sorts.

By that I mean there is a way to get an RSS feed of your watchlist, provided the url contains the correct token, which is like a secondary password to the extent that you can change it to whatever you want.

This means you can make your watchlist data completely public by posting the token on your user-page, or you can share it only with your buddies on that Eastern European Mailing List, etc. depending on how you feel about such things.

Example url to access this is:
en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=feedwatchlist&allrev=allrev&wlowner=CharlotteWebb&wltoken=no_this_is_not_the_correct_token&feedformat=rss

But if you did know the correct token you could see my watchlist.

I think the most practical application of this would be to categorize your watchlist using a bunch of dummy accounts, e.g. "pages I really care about", "pages I care about only until I'm sure some idiot isn't about to revert me", "pages where I just fixed a spelling error and would just as soon forget about", etc.

This was possible before but with this you no longer need to log out of your main account and into your various socks (thus risk accidentally editing from them) just to view chapter 21 of your watchlist, simply bookmark the url.

On the other hand I've long wondered why there still isn't a proper way to maintain several watchlists on the same account, or some way to set an auto-expiry (e.g. to forget pages you haven't edited since 2007).

Not counting the publicly viewable relatedchanges trick...

I was thinking of something more integrated, maybe where when you say "[x] Add this page to my watchlist" it says "okay, which one?"...

No. The only pages you automatically watch are ones you have created. I have to remember to unwatch ip and new account pages I warn (or block) when I am the first one there.

(edit) Looking at other posts on this subject, I am surprised to note that in having just over 200 watchers of my user/talk pages that I do not appear to be average - unless other correspondents here are below average?

I would definitely welcome such an improvement.

Yep, I had a sex change a year or so ago.

It started out true for mine, and I assume any other account created in the same era.

Urgh! I have over 450

I guess if you wanted to know whether to be afraid (very afraid) you could compare this to the number of users who have edited your talk page (not counting bots and anons).

Looks about 28.8% for you and only 17.5% for me. I actually find that a bit surprising!

Catchin' up to you, sistah.

Charlotte, you're the best! I've been trying to get that to work, but couldn't figure it out myself.

Most talk page watchers I could find:

Jimbo Wales - 1913
SlimVirgin - 627
Raul654 - 523
JzG - 522

No, it's a configurable setting, under preferences. "Add pages that I edit to my watchlist." I think the default is this, but I'm not sure.
I have 126.

And now I notice the option for an RSS feed on my watchlist.... Never saw that before. Cool. Too bad I don't need it now.

Yes, I would have found multiple watchlists quite useful. Some people use alternate accounts for this. But that's a bit of a pain.... I also found that watchlists effectively expire quickly a bit of a problem. You can only show a maximum of 7 days, so if you don't check your watchlist, and carefully, every week, it's a problem. The programmers seem to assume that everyone is so addicted to Wikipedia that they will check ever day. Of course, everyone who is important checks the watchlist constantly, right?

Don't know where you got that idea from. You can set your watchlist preferences to any period up to 30 days.

Not to ruin your fun or anything, but: Wikipedia:Database reports/Most-watched pages

Why on Earth is Little Barrier Island waaay up high on the list of watched pages, whereas it's one of the least edited, it would appear??

God knows. It was the subject of a dispute about what to call it.
Maybe someone told a bunch of admins to use it as a reference format?

For that matter, what is Richard Evans doing in there?
Or Playstation 3? Bizarre.

Can someone explain this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Splarka/Watchlist_bug

Isn't it just where if someone moves a page you're watching, then you're then left watching the new page name, even after it's moved back? I assumed that's how I end up with random vandalism pages on my watchlist.

I think Splarka's point was he could steal all of Freakofnurture's sandbox watchers in that way by moving the sandbox to a page of his chosing. I'm not sure why so many people watch Freakofnurture's sandbox, though.