On Monday, October 20, 2003, at 09:01 PM, Tim Starling wrote: ;-) I'm going to blame that one on my mail server acting screwy :-) -- Benjamin D. Esham { http://bdesham.net bdesham(a)iname.com } AIM: bdesham 1 2 8 http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 06:02:22PM -0700, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote: I disagree. That default will make the feature useless. Make the default Public and place a good notice on the edit page next to the watchlist chechbox. Why is making a watchlist public any worse than ones contributions? -- Audin Malmin - audin(a)okb-1.org They that can give up essential liberty for a little temporary saftey deserve neither liberty nor safety. -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759

--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I likewise agree it's bad idea. The concept of wikipedia is such that people should wathc ove each other's shoulders, because that's how articles get better over time. ===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan(a)yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/ __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com

Actually, it's a good idea. In no way is it a invasion of privacy. Anyone who wants to get some idea of a contributor's interests can look at his edit record. There's no good reason not to have watchlists be public. If you don't want people to know what your watchlist is, then don't have one. Wikipedia benefits the more open the actions and behavior of its participants are to each other and to the outside world. Qui custodiet custodies? Omnia mundi in Wikipediam. Don't confuse this with actual invasions of privacy.

The Cunctator wrote: By that logic there's no good reason to have watchlists be public, since as you say you can already see a person's editing interests from their recent edits. On Monday, Oct 20, 2003, at 21:01 US/Pacific, Andrew Lih wrote: It's essentially equivalent to automatically uploading your browser's bookmarks file for public viewing. Maybe you're expecting that and make sure you're only bookmarking pages you want your grandma and your boss to see you like, maybe you're not. I've suggested an opt-in "public watchlist" myself, actually, but I'm not sufficiently interested to program it. You can do this yourself by simply creating a page of links as a subpage to your userpage; it'll show up in "what links here" on the 'watched' pages and anyone can use the "related changes" function to use your list as a recentchanges filter. Further, you can have multiple lists according to category, topic, or whim. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

At 08:51 PM 10/20/2003, The Cunctator wrote: Well, I wouldn't go quite as far as to say that it's in no way an invasion of privacy, but I think that as long as the default is to private there's no reason we can't give people an OPTION to make their watchlists public. I am opposed, in principle, to any decision that limits peoples' options with no good cause. Just because YOU (editorial you) don't want your watchlist public is no reason to keep others from making theirs' public. Also, the "who watches the watchers" comment raises the old point that sunshine is, in general, a good cure for many ills.. but still, there ought to be a certain amount of privacy for things that are, in fairness, private. P.S. Will there also be a feature "Which Users Have Viewed My Watchlist"? ;) ----- Dante Alighieri dalighieri(a)digitalgrapefruit.com "The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of great moral crisis." -Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321

"Who watches the guards? The entire world in Wikipedia." Before watchlists, people kept lists of links on their userpages and used [[Special:Recentchangeslinked]] to watch their pages. This was open to public view; if somebody wanted a private watchlist, then I suppose that they just kept their list somewhere else (and were deprived of the convenience of [[Special:Recentchangeslinked]]). It's not clear to me whether, in creating [[Special:Watchlist]], the fact that the lists became private was intended or a side effect. If I had the option to make my watchlist public, then I would, in the interests of the openness that The Cunctator mentions here. At the same time, I don't want to remove the convenience that [[Special:Watchlist]] brings to watchlist management, simply because somebody prefers to keep a private watchlist. A user preference would avoid this, and that preference's justification would be if there were people that would insist upon using it. There seem to be some! As for the justification of having possibly public watchlists at all, well, I think that /I/ would only care about knowing /how many/ people are watching a given page. But if other people want more, and they can convince a developer to program it, then I won't complain. ^_^ -- Toby