Hi folks,
Today, we're happy to announce the release of the Thanks notification on the English Wikipedia, along with several new features and bug fixes, as outlined below.
1. Thanks notification This experimental feature offers a new way to give positive feedback on Wikipedia. It lets editors send a private 'Thank you' notification to users who make useful edits -- by clicking a small 'thank' link on their history or diff page, as described in our overview page. (1)
The purpose of the Thanks notification is to give quick positive feedback to recognize productive contributions. We hope that it will make it easier to show appreciation for each other's work -- and it should be particularly helpful for encouraging new users during their first critical steps on Wikipedia.
We have intentionally kept this notification as simple as possible, so we can all evaluate it and improve it together. Once you have had a chance to try it out, we welcome your feedback about this feature, and look forward to a healthy discussion on our talk page. (2)
2. New features Today, we also released a couple more features and bug fixes on the English Wikipedia and MediaWiki.org:
* Talk page messages are now marked as read when you visit the talk page -- and the red badge is reset as well (Bug 47912) (3)
* Tooltips in preferences help explain how notifications work when you hover over question marks (Bug 47094) (4)
Most of these revisions were made based on community feedback and we would love to hear if they work for you. If you come across any bugs, please report them here, or post them on Bugzilla. (5)
3. Next release For next releases, we're now focusing on these features, which were also requested by many community members:
* Provide 'diff' links in the flyout for talk page messages and mentions (Bug 48183) (6)
* More metrics dashboards, as specified in our research plan (7)
* HTML Email notifications, with clear visual cues about new activity (8)
4. Next steps Our follow-up goals for Notifications include:
* Complete core features next month
* Deploy Echo on international projects this summer
* Develop cross-wiki and a few key features this fall
* Support mobile + multimedia teams and developers
Our roadmap for 2013 is outlined in our E2 planning slides. (9)
Many thanks to all the community and team members who have helped us create and improve this project!
All the best,
Fabrice and the E2 Team
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notifications/Thanks
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Notifications/Thanks
(3) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47912
(4) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47094
(6) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=47912
(7) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Metrics#First_Dashboards
(8) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#HTML_single_email_no...
(9) https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/presentation/d/1LyqKRVH1mWs3OMWOCIL5...
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Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation