[WikiEN-l] ALERT: Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this page?"

Tue Oct 21 00:53:50 UTC 2003

On Monday, October 20, 2003, at 08:25  PM, Graham Burnett wrote:

> Idea for new feature: "Who's watching this page?"
>
> This got mooted on the Village Pump today- I'm STRONGLY against this, 
> to the
> extent that I'd withdraw from wikipedia with a demand that any history 
> of
> pages I'd watched be deleted from public record if it were to be 
> implemeted.
> Suffice to say many of us watch certain pages for many differing 
> reasons
> which are nobody elses business.

Why can't we have a user preference that says "Hide my watchlist from 
other users"?
Then, on the "Who's watching this page?" page, there would be a note to 
the effect
that there are X additional users that are watching the page, but whom 
do not want
to be identified.  This seems like a balanced solution to me -- users 
who value their
privacy could choose not to be identified, but the useful statistic of 
how many people
there are that are watching the page would still be available.

Just a thought :-)

-- 
Benjamin D. Esham      {      http://bdesham.net
bdesham at iname.com      }      AIM: bdesham 1 2 8
Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - wikipedia.org