How about "<$wgUnwatchedPageThreshold"?

This would simply require an additional check to make sure it isn't set to false, and if it is, just don't add the watchers row.

'<' is very unreadable. It looks like an opening parenthesis or an arrow. If you want to do something like this, just write "less than" in a human language.

(In reply to comment #1)

How about "<$wgUnwatchedPageThreshold"?

This would simply require an additional check to make sure it isn't set to
false, and if it is, just don't add the watchers row.

The point is not to determine the circumstances of when to add the watchers row - it is that users are expecting to see that row because they may be sent there from a link titled "Number of watchers", see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Histlegend

If the figure should not be shown to them (for whatever reason), the row entry should still be there, but with some short explanation instead of the actual figure. If the row is absent, they will suspect a bad link target.

(In reply to comment #3)

The point is not to determine the circumstances of when to add the watchers
row - it is that users are expecting to see that row because they may be sent
there from a link titled "Number of watchers", see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Histlegend

If the figure should not be shown to them (for whatever reason), the row
entry should still be there, but with some short explanation instead of the
actual figure. If the row is absent, they will suspect a bad link target.

Right. That's what Legoktm is proposing. He's saying to always include the table row for number of watchers when this feature is enabled (i.e., when $wgUnwatchedPageThreshold is not false). In this case, he's proposing using "<$wgUnwatchedPageThreshold", which for the English Wikipedia would be "<30" as the value for this row when it is restricted.

As comment 2 suggests, this might be better written as "less than $wgUnwatchedPageThreshold", which would translate to "less than 30".

Gerrit change 46489.

I checked a few grammar websites, and apparently it's supposed to be "fewer than" since "watchers" is a countable noun. At any rate, it can easily be customized in the MediaWiki namespace.

(In reply to comment #5)

Gerrit change #46489.

Thanks for this. :-) Somewhat related is that it'd be nice to have the ability to directly link to this table row via an HTML id attribute (bug 44252), but that's tangential to this bug, of course.

I checked a few grammar websites, and apparently it's supposed to be "fewer
than" since "watchers" is a countable noun. At any rate, it can easily be
customized in the MediaWiki namespace.

Hah, and we apparently even have an article about this on the English Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fewer_vs._less. I suppose "fewer than" is more correct, though I wonder, in this particular case, given that the noun is in fact arguably uncountable (when this message is shown), whether it should be "less than." ;-) As you say, we'll leave that to local admins to discuss and debate. Thanks again for the changeset.

Changeset merged. Should make it into 1.21wmf10.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.21/Roadmap