Grants:IdeaLab/Make watchlist and alerts more useful to unleash some potential

Make watchlist and alerts more useful to unleash some potential
Give attention to a few tasks related to making watchlists and alerts more useful, and explore that potential.
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Solstag
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created on14:53, 29 February 2016 (UTC)

Project idea edit

What is the problem you're trying to solve? edit

I can't approach an expert in, for example, "indigenous languages of Brazil", to create and configure a WM account for him to receive an email with the changes whenever a page in that category changes. I'm pretty sure that getting those emails would motivate him to curate the changes and contribute.

What is your solution? edit

Fix these bugs: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T3710 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T22444 Also the email alerts should be configurable to contain the actual content of changes to a page since the previous one. People need to see very concretely that they can contribute while still in their zone of comfort, that is, *before* they access wikipedia, otherwise they won't even bother to open the link to see the changes.

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Endorsements edit

  • I think it's a good idea to allow for daily / weekly watchlist digest that shows all changes in the specified time period (or all changes whenever depending on the user-option). It would be useful if one could tick and untick watchlist entries for this email-digest so that one can have many article on one's watchlist and just a few that one would like to get mails about. Btw I also think that this idea has been named poorly - way too general. Fixuture (talk) 22:40, 29 March 2016 (UTC)
Thanks Fixuture. I think the main point of the idea is that we currently have no way to deal with the situation described: people who have the knowledge to contribute but are only interested in a particular category and not interested or savvy enough to build or manage their own watch lists or even click a link in an email if the content of changes is not already there. We have to show these people that something is going on before they move with us, but there's great potential if we can do it. --Solstag (talk) 09:18, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

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