Erik Moeller wrote:
2011/4/18 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com:
Even on some Wikimedia wikis, it's the e-mail notifications that get me to go back to the site. I only ever visit strategy.wikimedia.org when someone edits my talk page, as it triggers an e-mail notification to me. The smaller sites have had these types of notifications for a long time. The notification system is built in to MediaWiki, it's just not enabled on larger sites such as the English Wikipedia. It's being tracked by bug https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5220.
We have a range of ideas about how e-mail could be used for retention/engagement, but I agree this one in particular seems like pretty low-hanging fruit -- thanks for flagging it. I've forwarded to the ops folks to surface any existing analysis/concerns people have raised about enabling this more broadly, as I didn't find the bug discussion particularly helpful. Is there any non-operations reason why this is currently being handled on a per-wiki basis?
As far as I'm aware, there aren't any non-operations reasons; there's consensus for this to be enabled pretty much everywhere.
The one software sticking point would be a matter of defaults, I think. The discussion on the English Wikipedia, for example, favored an opt-in system. MediaWiki by default makes the notifications for user talk page changes opt-out ($wgDefaultUserOptions in includes/DefaultSettings.php defines "enotifusertalkpages" as being enabled). This default behavior is generally helpful on small wikis where adjusting your preferences isn't a top priority (such as strategy.wikimedia.org or meta.wikimedia.org). For established users on a larger project, you'd probably want to change the default to avoid startling people.
MZMcBride