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:

Thanks, and stay tuned for more. 

Fabrice