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

[MZMcBride]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> 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?

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