Hi guys,
We just released Notifications on another batch of wiki sites today: Bosnian, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, Hebrew, Romanian and Spanish Wikipedias, as well as English Wikivoyage and Simple Wikipedia.
The Echo extension has already been well received on the French, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese and Swedish Wikipedias, where notifications are being used actively, though in very different ways: we're seeing a lot of activity for talk messages on most sites, but welcome, mentions and thanks notification levels vary quite a bit from site to site. More on this later.
Going forward, we plan to have weekly releases every Tuesday, as outlined in this Echo release plan:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013
To prepare for each of these releases, we post announcements several weeks in advance, and invite community members to help translate and discuss this tool with their peers. We're finding that this approach helps build productive relationships within each community and encourages a smoother, stress-free adoption. We hope we can apply the same methodology for other major product releases in the future.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank our community liaison team for their invaluable help in socializing this multi-site release: Keegan Peterzell and Jan Eissfeld have been particularly helpful, along with Philippe Beaudette, Maggie Dennis, Anna Koval, Patrick Earley and Sherry Snyder. Thanks as well to our fearless developer Benny Situ for making these deployments possible. :)
Please let us know if you have any questions about this new release. Enjoy ...
Fabrice, on behalf of the E2 team
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Fabrice Florin Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation