Aryeh Gregor wrote:
Why do we hide Special:UnwatchedPages from regular users? Unwatched pages are something that people should know about so they can be sure to watch them. If no one is actively watching a page, it's more likely that vandalism will stick around. Yes, vandals and trolls could abuse the info, but they could abuse all sorts of other features too, and that's not a reason to deny them to legitimate users. If there is any such threat, then that will just encourage legitimate users to watch the pages, thereby removing them from the list.
If the admin wants to allow it, he can enable it or publish a list of pages to watch on the Vilalge Pump. Suppose you open it. Who is more likely to start using it? People with too few watched pages or vandals? I would expect it to be the entry point the next time Fooers angry for having deleted the article about Foo decide "to take revenge". On the contrary, I don't foresee getting loads of goodwill users to watch those pages (unless it's slashdotted in a "how to vandal").
Chad wrote:
I would expect that if we changed this in core, WMF would set a default on their end setting it to sysop-only, as it is now. The projects should not see a change in config like that against their wishes, we agree on that point
If you make a change on default configuration that forces users to manually set it back to the previous one, you shouldn't have changed it.