MZMcBride's email about emails reminded me that every automated email from Wikimedia servers looks like a bunch of programming code. The first idea was that it would be better to have some better formatted emails with some more information (for example, I would like to see diff inside of my email when I get notification about changing my talk page). But, then I've realized that we don't have a designer. By "designer" I mean a person who is employed by WMF and who is constantly working on improving MediaWiki look and feel. While a lot of us may be completely fine with reading Wikipedia articles through links, there are people who care about look and feel. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Foundation-l] Better user experience and retention through e-mail notifications Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2011 01:55:10 -0500 From: MZMcBride &lt;z(a)mzmcbride.com&gt; Reply-To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List &lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List &lt;foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org&gt; Hi. I'm not sure about other people, but one of the primary reasons I get on Facebook is that Facebook reminds me to get on. It sends notification e-mails about a Wall post or a comment or whatever. Without these, I wouldn't check it more than once every few days. There's been a lot of talk about getting new editors and keeping them. I would think something like working e-mail notifications would be a high priority. There are plenty of features and enhancements that could improve the user experience and user retention/return, but this piece of fruit seems particularly low-hanging. 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>. MZMcBride _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l