Andrea, there are a couple things here.
1) The reason that other people can't see your lists items is because you have categorized them under your "iris" category that you created, and that category has been marked by you as a private category. You can change that by going to your lists control panel and then in the navigation bar on the left click on "Manage Categories". Then edit the iris category and you'll see the privacy settings.
2) The bug here is that it is showing a large count on your profile since the number is including private ones. That causes confusion and I think the right course of action for me here is to update the system to not even show the number of items that are hidden in private categories.
