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

[Erik Moeller]

2011/4/18 MZMcBride <z at 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?
-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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