I was sort of assuming this was a foregone conclusion and been focusing on mitigation, but if we're cool with me showing up late to the party, I'm with Luke on this. The concept of "being linked to" in a Wikipedian sense is not massively transparent to new users. It also isn't necessarily particularly meaningful.

On 11 January 2013 19:19, Luke Welling WMF <lwelling@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I've heard the "a page you created in the last 30 days was linked to" idea from a couple of people so let me put in my vote against.

I really dislike complicated, mysterious behaviour.  If the logic can't cleanly be described in the text description of the notification, then I think it's the wrong logic.  I don't think any notification type wants a day limit filter, or a for users with <x edits filter, or any other logic that will be confusing to recipients.

The cure for spam is to not auto enable email notifications for existing accounts, and to put work into email cadence controls across all notification types (except talk page messages) before launching to "real" users.  Applying weird custom business logic to different notification types is a recipe for bugs and confusion and will just lead to more weird single case cures when you hit power users who still hit their personal spam threshold on 30 day limited pages.

Simple consistent behaviour is better for the users and better for the codebase.

Luke


On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 2:50 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 01/10/2013 05:30 PM, Chris McMahon wrote:
>
>     Facebook has a really nice design along those lines, which I think
>     we can emulate.
>
>     See these screenshots
>     <https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/presentation/d/1ZRqi7bo8W-HgzJ_riskqFMTIPBIlWDmwMURbmnvr19w/edit#slide=id.g2ee45dc7_1_58> in
>     our best practices deck.
>
>
> I am starting to think that the "<page> was linked" should not be
> subject to individual notifications at all.

I thought about this, and at first I thought I agreed.  But I actually
think it could be interesting for main namespace pages I created,
especially recent ones.  If it's mainspace->mainspace (a link *on* an
article *to* an article) and there is a time-based filter ("links to
articles you created within the last 30 days"), I would probably use it.

> Pages you created in the past being linked by others are a different
> kind of interaction that is not human-to-human, but more akin to, for
> example, someone visiting a blog page that you wrote some time in the
> past.

I'd say it's somewhere in between, since writing something (the link is
just one aspect) using your page is different from just visiting it.

Matt Flaschen

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Oliver Keyes
Community Liaison, Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation