I think it would be the bee's knees if every single user's watchlists were public record. Aside from e-mail address, it's really the only thing that isn't.

Issues of bias, concern, or possible wikistalking would be easily exposed thus, and would help keep people honest.

Even better would be if Wikipedia could find out which articles you're looking at, or even track what other websites you're using your computer to access.

Nah, the ideal would be if Wikipedia could monitor your entire life, from cradle to grave, and act like Rev. Moon in making all your major life choices for you - by consensus.

The resulting boredom of watchlists comprised of watchlists which turn are comprised or watchlists... would surely be the deathblow of WP.

As I suggested previously, I think that there should be no such thing as a "watchlist", because it encourages ownership of articles and stalking. The only "legitimate" value to it is to monitor people who you think might be vandals/disruptive users. Therefore, watchlists should be an admin tool only, and not available to regular users (I personally never used one).

However, if they refuse to get rid of the watchlist, then making them public record would be the next best thing, as it would demonstrate a person's bias, and perhaps also whether they are doing the wrong thing with stalking etc.

it certainly would create some hilarious sockpuppet accusations.

Care to elaborate?

Perhaps he means that some enterprising person would create a handy tool to aggregate everyone's watchlist and use it to show "similar interests" among the Faithful. These could then be used as the basis for a Wiki-dating service, to help lonely Wikipedians find others who are compatible with them. Unfortunately, many would find that they're to be "set up" with none other than... themselves!

As the Rev. Moon has said, "Let's say there are 500 sons and daughters like you in each state. Then we could control the government!"

Yeah I can imagine the accusations:

"Well, they have the exact same 15 items on their watch lists. So either one of them is stalking the other, or else they are the same person. Combine that with them both hating Morton Devonshire, and I think that they are the same person. Ban them"

Response: "But everyone hates Morton Devonshire"

"Stalking. Ban them"

Somey pretty much nailed it, but when "living in England in a similar way" is evidence of sockpuppetry, imagine what a public watchlist would do. it would never be entirely public, btw. It would be limited to admins or arbcom, or perhaps a new permission group named "Watchers". imagine if 3 people have a certain number of obscure articles watchlisted, they have the same user agent and that they locate to the same metropolitan area. Fred had less evidence than that to ban poor Miltopia, albeit temporarily.

i won't be surprised to see it introduced.

The Miltopia thing was discussed on WR, and oddly just after we'd discussed it, whammo its on Wikipedia. Then we dismissed it as a mistake, and whammo he's unblocked.

We are controlling Wikipedia!

I disagree. First they'd make it so administrators could erase your watchlists. Second, people could make a hidden sock account that's years old and unused and put their watchlist in that -- even if the account is banned and all, watchlist is still good. Third, admins might go and ban people from watchlists. Fourth, privacy invasion.



Wikipedia has RSS feeds and people would subscribe to them. Or they'd have a list links to history and then they'd check the history, maybe even using an external program for watchlists.

What on earth? Blissy - are you ever going to stop parading around how completely ignorant you are? Watchlists are useful for many, many reasons. I used them to keep tabs on articles I was writing to FA as I was collaborating with another editor and sometimes his edits needed a bit of tweaking (as did mine). There is nothing stalkerlike about it. If you could use watchlists to keep track of other people's contribs then perhaps you might have something, but to do that you'd have to watchlist a stupid amount of articles and 90% of the edits you saw would be by people unrelated.

...what on Earth? I simply meant that anyone should be able to view anyone else's Watchlist, ala how we can see anyone else's monobook.js.

1. Encourages transparency in every level.
2. It's not any sort of privacy invasion.
3. Allows for spotting of sockpuppets in another interesting way.
4. Allows for detection of hidden COIs.

You can pretty much get an idea of what people watch by looking at the contributions. Many will watch pretty much every article they edit. Others will pick and choose. Then again, mine has more than 10,000 items on it, many of which I'm not interested in whatsoever.

Of course, you can get around watch lists by using book marks on your web browser. Nonetheless they force you to go to the extra step. Indeed, if they were made public, then anyone trying to hide would use bookmarks instead.

Then people would hide it on another account.

"They are going to be abusive anyway, why not just encourage it?"

Any system that is created anywhere is going to be abused. You know it is going to be abused. But I don't think that you should encourage the abuse by making it even easier. If you got rid of watch lists, or second best bet made them visible to everyone (nobody has suggested visible only to admins), then the abuse can still happen, but its harder to do. You make it harder to abuse, then its going to happen an awful lot less.

Its kind of like installing a burglar alarm. Sure it doesn't completely stop anyone from stealing, but it stops perhaps 95% of them.

watchlists aren't public because of vandalism concerns, I don't agree that they should not be nither.

Bad idea