[Foundation-l] Better user experience and retention through e-mail notifications

[MZMcBride]

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