Hi folks,
I'm happy to announce that we have just deployed HTML Email notifications on the English Wikipedia.
We developed this feature to provide a more appealing email experience, with clear visual cues and less clutter, as outlined in this feature requirements page (1). Another related feature we also deployed today is an improved notification structure (2) that makes notifications easier to read by removing confusing edit summaries.
Note that you can control which email notifications your receive and how they are displayed in your Preferences page (3). For example, if you would like to get email notifications when someone mentions your name on a talk page, check the 'Email' box next to 'Mentions', then click 'Save'. Or if you would rather receive plain text emails instead of HTML emails, select 'plain text' next to 'Email format' and click 'Save'. Easy as pie :)
Please let us know how these new features work for you. We're particularly interested in feedback on how HTML emails work on your mobile phone. Can you see the notifications well? Is it easy to click on the notification buttons? If you experience serious issues, please report them by email here -- or on Bugzilla (4). Please include screenshots if you can, as well as the name of the application, operating system and device you were using. To learn more, check our Help page (5).
Next, we plan to release notifications on the French Wikipedia, then incrementally on other wiki sites throughout the next few weeks, as outlined in this Notifications Release Plan (5). If you are active on another Wikipedia project and would like to get notifications deployed on your site, please read the checklist on that page and contact me to discuss.
We hope that you will find these new features helpful. They are part of an overall initiative to improve the user experience on Wikipedia by modernizing some of our tools to better match the expectations of our users. We think that these new features meet that goal -- and look forward to enhancing them in coming weeks with your help.
Thanks to all the community and team members who helped make this release possible! We are particularly grateful to Benny Situ and Vibha Bamba for taking these two new features through the finish line today.
Onward!
Fabrice, on behalf of the Editor Engagement team
(1) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#HTML_single_email_no...
(2) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Feature_requirements#Improved_Notificatio...
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo
(4) https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&...
(5) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Notifications
(6) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo/Release_Plan_2013
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Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Editor Engagement Wikimedia Foundation