Hi everyone, 

Here's a quick update on our latest developments for Notifications this week.

1. Today's release
Here are some of the revisions we just deployed today on the English Wikipedia and MediaWiki.org:
* A/B test of new user productivity (read more below) (1)
* New metrics: we're now tracking views and clicks for web notifications (2)
* Skin support: Modern and Monobook now work (Cologne is next) (3)
* Thanks confirmation is now required (to prevent accidental clicks) (4)

Please let us know if you have any comments or questions. If you come across any bugs, please report them here, or post them on Bugzilla. (5)

2. A/B Test
Throughout this week, we will be running an A/B test to study the general effects of Notifications on the behavior of new editors on Wikipedia. When someone creates a new account on the English Wikipedia this week, they will be automatically assigned to one of two groups: 
* an Echo cohort, which will get the same notifications as new users have been getting in recent weeks 
* a pre-Echo cohort, which will only get the old talk page message notifications, without any Echo notifications
During this test,  we will use behavioral measurements to determine which users were more active (survival rate, edits, labor hours), productive (revert rate), communicative (talk & user_talk edits) and burdensome (revert rate, block rate). We will stop bucketing new users into the pre-Echo cohort after a week, and that cohort will be switched to Echo notifications after a month, so they're not left out. Read more about this and related tests in our Research:Notifications pages on Meta. (1)

3. Thanks notification
Our Thanks notification seems to have been generally well received by English community: over 4,000 thanks notifications have been sent in the past ten days (6), and they are now as frequent as notifications for page reviews or user mentions, with ~200 unique senders/day, ~300 unique recipients/day (vs. ~40/day for Wikilove). Community members have made many productive suggestions for improving this feature, and many have taken the time to show their appreciation on our talk page (7), which of course is music to our ears. It's great to see  ... : )

4. New features
We're now working on these features, which we aim to deploy in coming weeks: 
* Flyout links (secondary links to diff pages for talkpage messages) (8)
* HTML Email Notifications (9)
* Mobile notifications (now in beta)
* More metrics dashboards
* 'Suppressed' content feature
* Internationalization updates 
* Watchlist preference

5. Next steps
Our follow-up goals for Notifications include:
* Complete core features this month
* Deploy Echo on international projects this summer
* Develop cross-wiki and a few key features this fall
* Support mobile + multimedia teams and third-party developers

Our roadmap for Notifications in 2013 is outlined on our E2 planning page for editor engagement features. (10)


Thanks to Benny, Erik B., Dario, Kaldari, Oliver, Vibha and all our other team members and community partners for making this project possible. We look forward to our next steps together!


Fabrice, on behalf of the Editor Engagement team.


(1) http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Notifications/Experiment_1
(2) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Metrics#Views_Dashboard
(3) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47932
(4) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47658
(5) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=Echo
(6) http://toolserver.org/~dartar/en/echo/
(7) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications/Thanks#I_love_this_feature.
(8) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48183
(9) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#HTML_single_email_notifications
(10) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Editor_Engagement/2013_strategy_planning_(Features)


_______________________________

Fabrice Florin
Product Manager, Editor Engagement
Wikimedia Foundation


Donate to keep Wikipedia free: