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 :-)