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

Tue Oct 21 04:12:53 UTC 2003

The Cunctator wrote:
>> 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.

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:
> Edit history does not equal watch list.  I can watch something without
> having edited it.  And other people being able to see my watch list is
> an invasion of privacy of sorts,

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.

>  so this should be "opt-in" only, not
> the default, if implemented.

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)