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 :-)
My word, that *is* a good idea. Why didn't I think of that?
-- Tim Starling.