Hi folks,
We'd like to give you a heads-up about the upcoming release of Notifications (1) on
Wikimedia Commons in coming weeks.
This software tool will inform users about new activity that affects them on Commons, in a
unified way: for example, it will let you know when you have new talk page messages, edit
reverts, thanks, mentions or links -- and is designed to augment (rather than replace) the
watchlist. The Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team developed this tool
(code-named 'Echo') earlier this year, to help users contribute more productively
to MediaWiki projects.
Notifications were first released on the English Wikipedia in April 2013, and have now
been successfully deployed on dozens of other wikis in different languages, including the
Dutch, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and
Vietnamese Wikipedias, to name but a few. Community response has been very positive so
far, across languages and regions. Users are responding particularly well to social
features such as Mentions and Thanks, which enable them to communicate more effectively
than before. Learn more in our recent blog post (2).
We're now getting ready to bring Notifications to Wikimedia Commons and other sister
sites, and are aiming for an October 22 deployment for our first release. This release
will include some basic features shared by all other sites. Our multimedia team is also
considering developing a few special notifications for Commons (e.g.: 'Your file was
used in an article'), and we will start a community discussion about these ideas after
our first release.
Please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this new tool
in this Village Pump thread:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Notifications_on_Co…
Thanks, and stay tuned for more.
Fabrice
(1)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)
(2)
http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedia…
_______________________________
Fabrice Florin
Product Manager
Wikimedia Foundation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)