One of Wikidata core problems at the moment is that it doesn't have enough review of edits and thus vandalism doesn't often takes a while to get reverted.
This is partly because information is spread over more different pages than on Wikipedia.
If you imagine that you have 10 Wikidata items that got each edited by 3 people for a total of 10 edits each on the one hand and one Wikipedia article with 100 edits by 30 people, the amount of edits that both pages have is the same.
The Wikipedia article is on the watchlist of many people and on the other hand the Wikidata items are only watched by three people.
What could be done to change this?
Currently, pages are put on a watchlist if new statements get created however only the page on which the statement is made is added to the watchlist.
We need more event where pages get added to watchlists:
- Adding properties to the watchlist when they are used
- Add the linked property to the watchlist
That means when I add the statement "hand" "anatomical location" "free upper limb" I add all the pages to my watchlist plus the relevant talk pages.
At the time of this writing the talk page for "anatomical location" has a "Number of page watchers who visited recent edits" of 4. That means that it's not possible to have a discussion about how the property should be used with other people who use the property.
When we automatically add the property when it gets used to the watchlist this suddenly means it's possible to have a discussion about how "anatomical location" should be used that gets seen by the people who use the property. That's valuable for standardizing it's usage. It will get new users sooner into contact with discussions with other users.
The second issue that gets solved is the ability to clean up vandalism to the labels of highly used properties and items fast. As Wikidata gets used more it becomes also more unacceptable that it takes hours to revert vandalism on the item of a country.
This change would increase the watchers of such highly used pages enough that the vandalism reverting will get fast.
Does this create a watchlist overload? There should be the possibility on "Preferences/Watchlist" to turn off this feature. Having the option is in line with the current ability to manage which pages get added to the watchlist. This possibility will allow high activity users to solve the problem for them.
On the other hand, this feature might increase the need for the ability to filter the watchlist by language. If you have 5,000 people following the item Germany and you have 20 seldomly used languages who add labels to it, it's likely not efficient that 5,000 people who can't read the language see the item. The work required for filtering seems doable and not directly urgent.