[Foundation-l] (no subject)

Fri Apr 15 21:30:21 UTC 2005

> Is there any reason he can't just come up with a random watchlist for made
> up users? I guess the table could be given out with scrambled usernames, but
> I wouldn't like the watchlist tables to be given out otherwise.

Scrambled user names would not solve the privacy issue. It would still
be very easy to guess which watchlist belonged to which person based
on which articles they were watching. I doubt, for example, that
anyone else has all my user talk archives and other sub pages on their
watchlist other than me. Similiarly, most people watch the articles
they have created, so if only one person is watching [[Ajaria]],
[[Ajman]], and [[Batumi]], you can guess that this is probably Danny's
watchlist.

I think the only solution to this is to ask people to opt-in to the
study, and then the watchlists of only those people could be
extracted.

Angela.