[Wikipedia-l] Watch this user

[Daniel Mayer]

On Tuesday 10 September 2002 05:28 pm, LDC wrote:
> Why not just put a link to that user's contributions page
> on your user page?

Devil's advocate (that is, don't take me too seriously):
Then why do we have watch lists? We can simply put links to the articles we 
want to watch on our user page. I'm currently watching a couple hundred pages 
so in order to see what has been happening with those articles when I was 
away from Wikipedia I would have to spend at least a couple of hours opening 
each page and looking at its history each day (either that or look through 
thousands of edits on Recent Changes). End Devil's advocate.

The whole point of my original idea was to quickly move many IPs off the IP 
blocked list. In order to do this with a minimum amount of risk, some type of 
"watch IP" functionality would be needed. Therefore if I temporarily block an 
IP for posting vulgarities on several pages I would like to know when this IP 
makes another edit after the block is lifted. This would be a type of 
probation (liftable any time by any sysop). 

My original idea was to have a separate Recent Changes of edits made my all 
IPs on probation but simply having their IP bolded in the regular Recent 
Changes would be a good idea too.

The reason I have not posted this to SorceForge is because this is a 
policy-level feature request and needs to be discussed before it is even 
considered for implementation. 

The idea of having a general "watch user" function was not part of my 
original idea (but should be easy to implement if the IP probation idea is 
implemented). I don't know how useful general "watch user" function would be, 
however. If the two functions lived side-by-side then it might be confusing 
to differentiate between those IPs on probation and those users you simply 
are interested in tracking.  Different colors would work I guess; bolded red 
(or other warning color) for IPs on probation (this would be viewable to at 
least every logged-in user) and simply bold for those on your personal 'watch 
user' list (which is unique to your own settings).

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)