Meta:Babel/Archives/2013-07

Babel link in sidebar

I just noticed that the "Babel" link (to this page) in the sidebar is under "Navigation". Shouldn't it be under "Community", since its purpose is discussion? - dcljr (talk) 00:13, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Probably yes. I don't really care but I also think it would be more senseful to have it under "Community" exactly for the reason you stated above. Vogone talk 17:54, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Most viewed pages on Meta

According to stats.grok.se, the Main Page is the #3 most viewed article on Meta. Any idea what the other top viewed pages here are? In particular, what is the most viewed page? PiRSquared17 (talk) 02:45, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

See this ranking. It's because people can access any Meta page without visiting the Main Page. LlamaAl (talk) 03:16, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
Or rather, because the first two beat it by three order of magnitudes thanks to fake page views :) (they're special pages loaded on Meta by any user loading a CentralNotice banner). --Nemo 12:17, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
Why are people viewing Special/wiki/Special:BannerRandom, MediaWiki:Wikiminiatlas.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript&smaxage=21600&maxage=86400, etc? These links are not correct. This would seem to indicate a bug in the CN software and one in the way Wikiminiatlas is loaded. PiRSquared17 (talk) 12:59, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
And "w:en:Pasqual Pinon"??? PiRSquared17 (talk) 13:01, 3 July 2013 (UTC)
The latter is most likely bugzilla:26115; the others may be caused by anything, it happens. --Nemo 13:08, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Move meta.wikimedia.org to www.wikimedia.org

The following discussion is closed: There is a strong opposition to both proposals, closing as unsuccessful. Thehelpfulone 00:36, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Hi.

The multilingual portal for Wikipedia is at www.wikipedia.org. Same for Wiktionary, Wikinews, Wikiversity, etc. Even Wikidata and MediaWiki are multilingual projects located at www.

I propose moving meta.wikimedia.org to www.wikimedia.org. This is a variant of an older proposal, but is much more limited in scope. This proposal is only about changing the URL from "meta.wikimedia.org" to "www.wikimedia.org". Other redirects (such as http://meta.wikipedia.org) would continue to work.

Consequences

Feel free to edit this list to add good or bad consequences of this proposal.

Thoughts? --MZMcBride (talk) 04:14, 16 May 2013 (UTC)

Currently, this website is known as Meta-Wiki, or Meta. Would the website at its new location be called "Wikimedia.org" or something like that? harej (talk) 04:16, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
That's a good question. I have no idea. I don't see any good reason to change the site name (or project namespace). This site will still be a meta-wiki. I'd say the site name is outside the scope of this proposal, but I'd be interested to hear what others think. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:19, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
The site name is very much part of the proposal if you're proposing eliminating the current site name from the URL. Right now, we have a website called Meta that is logically at meta dot wikimedia dot org. Eliminating that and just making it wikimedia.org would create a disconnect between the URL of the website and what it's actually called, and I hate when people do that. harej (talk) 04:25, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
It'd be more logically at meta.org or metawiki.org. :-) I agree that you raise a good point to consider. I just personally don't see the two as being as tied together as you do. That is, it doesn't bother me to use www.wikimedia.org and continue calling the site Meta-Wiki. Perhaps I'm alone in this. It would bother me to call the site "Wikimedia.org," I think. --MZMcBride (talk) 04:33, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
This is "Wikimedia Meta-Wiki", so it's at meta.wikimedia.org. The www. subdomains should only used when there is no other project, like for mw.org and Wikidata. For "Wikimedia", we however have also Wikimedia Incubator, Wikimedia Outreach, Wikimedia Commons, etc. --MF-W 14:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
No. I'd preferr to keep things as they are. The current URL makes more sense than the proposed. Meta is not the whole Wikimedia, and as MF-W says, other projects use the same terminology. This is Meta, at meta.wikimedia.org; not very hard to remember. -- MarcoAurelio (talk) 15:35, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
What about links like https://www.wikimedia.org/wiki/? They currently redirect to the Foundation wiki, so this may create a few broken links. PiRSquared17 (talk) 15:42, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
They should never have been used. Luckily, only MZ abuses them as far as I can see. :) --Nemo 16:34, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
  • I don't see any benefits. Personally, I also don't see meta being a frontispiece for any of that WMF stuff, nor the need for it to be. Meta is inwardly customer focused, it supports the broader wikis, and is mechanistic, not leading with content, especially not for the casual visitor. If someone comes to wikimedia.org, I am pretty certain it is not meta for which they are looking. — billinghurst sDrewth 15:51, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
    What are they looking for then? There's no reason whatsoever to visit www.wikimedia.org. --Nemo 16:34, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
    I think it's still fairly common for people to type in "noun" + ".com" when looking for something on the Internet. For example, if you want shoes, you'd go to shoes.com. If you want porn, you'd go to porn.com. For information about Wikimedia, you'd go to wikimedia.com (which kindly redirects to wikimedia.org). --MZMcBride (talk) 18:29, 16 May 2013 (UTC)
    And surely they don't find anything relevant at the current portal. :) I don't know what they're looking for, but certainly not what there is now. By the way, I think people are more likely to type noun+whatever in Google: yes, I saw them, they are lazy like that. And here's what they get.
    File:Google2013-wikimedia-com.png
    google:wikimedia.com
    --Nemo 09:42, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose People going to www.wikimedia.org are probably not looking for Meta-Wiki. Meta-Wiki is a background project which not too many people know about. More likely, they are looking for information about the Wikimedia Foundation or any of the projects run by the Foundation. Instead, I suggest moving the link to wmf: to some place more prominently on that page, with links to individual projects below, or even moving wmf: to that location. --Stefan2 (talk) 20:24, 19 May 2013 (UTC)
  • &  the current template rightfully points users to the wide array of projects that compose wikimedia and allow them to find what they're looking for. Snowolf How can I help? 12:23, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose Meta and wikimedia.org cover quite different "communities":
    • here we have policies for admins, CU, and so on hwo reflect a community caring for meta-wiki affairs; this project could be seen as a "Times Square", a "Campo", where people coming from from many places meet and talk, discuss, chat, sometimes quarrel about WMF projects.
    • www.wikimedia.org has a stricter and stronger need for security and control, and a foundation managing and regulating in terms of economy and law a wide array of projects; this site can be compared to a skyscraper of corporate presence facing Times Square, or the Public Palace in Siena.

Square and buildings can be part of the same landscape, but are built for complementary but different activities. - εΔω 15:05, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

  •   Oppose - this proposal breaks in my opinion more than it solves. If the page www.wikimedia.org is a problem, just let it redirect to the front page of Meta. I certainly do not see the consistency, www.wikipedia.org is the same as www.wikimedia.org, and many others, that is consistency. People are used to Meta, all links point to Meta, it has taken years for communities to get used to Meta, please not again. Romaine (talk) 15:02, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose This wiki is know as meta. If it as a move from meta.wiki to www.wikimeta.org then I would support it. It also breaks incubator.wikimedia.org and other wikimedia projects. Carsrac (talk) 09:25, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose Commons and Incubator get more difficult to find. --Rschen7754 10:58, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
    • One could also say the opposite, because on the Meta main page we are able to explain what they are and translate the explanation, while the current portal can only have a logo. But I see your point; we'd need to make the projects list more prominent in the main page, either moving it up or making it a sort of sidebar: doesn't sound too hard. If we wanted to, of course. --Nemo 11:12, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose If you really need a www url for this project www.metawiki.org would make more sense. Amqui (talk) 03:28, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Oppose - it may well have been a good idea in 2002, but it creates chaos to move site names. It's the kind of thing corporate geniuses frequently come up with in boardrooms when they want to figure out a way to kill traffic to their site. Wnt (talk) 15:48, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose Meta (interwiki coordination) != www.wikimedia.org (general index page, general domain) --Alan (talk) 19:51, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose per Alan.--Steinsplitter (talk) 12:00, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose This site is an entirely different purpose from what I would expect to find at www.wikimedia.org. Unless people want to completely overhaul and change the way the main page and top-level help and other similar articles are written (a slight overhaul might be overdue anyway, but that's another topic entirely), it would be something of a disaster, I think. —Willscrlt “Talk” • “w:en” • “c” ) 07:38, 3 June 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose per Alan --Glaisher (talk) 12:25, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose People are used to the way it is now, changing it would probably just cause confusion--TheMillionRabbit 04:11, 1 July 2013 (UTC)

Move wikimediafoundation.org to wikimedia.org

Extracted from section above for separate discussion.
  • I'd rather wikimediafoundation.org be moved to wikimedia.org. It would be consistent with the various WMF chapters (such as uk.wikimedia.org), and at this point, I think the WMF is what people generally look for when they visit wikimedia.org. – Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 09:25, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  • This suggestion is good. The Foundation is the top level and should get the central domain, which is wasted on the current content of wikimedia.org. — Scott talk 09:49, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
  • + 1, like Minh above me. If you look at Wikimedia, en:Wikimedia, de:Wikimedia, fr:Wikimedia you won’t get any explanation about Meta-Wiki, but about the foundation which is responsible for the wikis, so it could be the only wiki that can use this name. --Geitost diskusjon 18:29, 17 May 2013 (UTC)
    • Explain: My comment here was originally about moving meta.wikimedia.org to www.wikimedia.org, not about moving the foundation wiki. I would rather move the foundation wiki to wikimedia.org than the meta wiki, that’s what I mean and meant. But that doesn’t mean at the same time that there is a need to move it or to move anything anywhere, it doesn’t have to be moved, it could also stay as it is. But if something should be moved, then it would be better to move this wiki than the other one. Now that my comment has been placed in a section with another title, it could be misunderstood. It’s no good idea to move comments for a section to another section with another name. If nothing is to be moved at all and wikimedia.org remains to be as it is with links to many wikis including the foundation wiki and the meta and commons wikis and so on, that would totally be ok for me. I don’t see a need for moving anything to wikimedia.org. But I think it would be a very bad idea to move the meta wiki to wikimedia.org, so this comment was about moving the meta wiki. --Geitost diskusjon 19:04, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
  • + 1 to Minh above. ·Add§hore· Talk To Me! 18:30, 19 May 2013 (UTC)
  • &  the Wikimedia Foundation is a distinct entity from the volunteer run project. This is especially important when it comes to the OTRS email addresses, which are answered by volunteers and not WMF personnel. Also, several volunteer-run wikis are housed under *.wikimedia.org and it would be wrong to put them under the foundation's own wiki, especially given the recent events regarding the kicking out of all volunteer admins from wikimediafoundation.org . Solution in search of a problem imo. Snowolf How can I help? 12:21, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
  • The Wikimedia Foundation is, as the name suggest, a Wikimedia Foundation — it's not Wikimedia. Wikimedia is the movement (community) around Wikipedia and its sisters projects that encompasses a variety of groups and organisations—of which the Foundation is only one example. Therefore, wikimedia.org should be a portal through which people can access those projects, and if necessary, also websites of those organisations—a role that it's playing now, so there's no need to change it. odder (talk) 16:11, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Per Odder. Furthermore, moving a wiki would be quite unnecessary effort. Vogone talk 16:17, 22 May 2013 (UTC)
  • The top level of the Wikimedia movement is the Wikimedia community, not the Wikimedia Foundation. Also as having seen the discussion around the situation on WMF wiki, and being a closed wiki and acting like that is certainly not something we should put on top. Romaine (talk) 15:08, 24 May 2013 (UTC)
  • A move from wikimediafountation.org to wmf.wikimedia.org is more logical. So also I'm against this proposal. But closed and open wiki bring under one roof is another discussion. Carsrac (talk) 09:41, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose basically per Romaine considering the foundationwiki scandal. --Rschen7754 10:56, 25 May 2013 (UTC)
  • Weird vote, neither yes nor no nor neutral. The non-use of www. is obviously something that can be fixed, but moving the foundation pages is too drastic. Even redirecting consistently to the foundation may be questionable. But still, it would be nice to see www. be open to volunteer effort to improve it - for example, there ought to be a row of flags or other icons representing popular languages so that someone coming to the site who only speaks, say Russian can immediately click on the tricolor and get links to all the ru.*.orgs . So there should be a way to log in to the site, to discuss edits there to the main splash page, to set up other navigation subpages, to run multilingual newsletters showcasing content, etc. One consequence of this would be that some www.wikimedia.org pages would redirect to other projects, with the Foundation being a major recipient of links. Wnt (talk) 15:56, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose per Snowolf. --Alan (talk) 19:52, 27 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose per Snowolf. --Steinsplitter (talk) 11:57, 29 May 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose - they don't deserve it (per Snowolf)  ono  17:19, 2 June 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose Per above, the community is the highest authority on Wikimedia. Ajraddatz (Talk) 17:29, 7 June 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose Once again, people are probably used to the way it is now, changing it would probably just cause confusion--TheMillionRabbit 04:11, 1 July 2013 (UTC)
  •   Support Keep it simple ! Lotje (talk) 16:03, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

Is this a large enough sample to determine e.g. what percentage of pages are in English? (see Talk:Multilingualism - it's outdated) PiRSquared17 (talk) 02:32, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Sure, but our estimate won't be very precise. Assuming the selection is really random (I assume you used Special:Random), a (large-sample) 95% confidence interval for the proportion of pages in the main namespace that are in English (I used the human-checked "Language" column and counted "en-x-simple" as English) is given by:
 
So, with 95% confidence, we can say that anywhere from 36.23% to 55.77% of pages in the main namespace are in English (or that the percentage is 46% with a margin of error of 9.77%). If you want a narrower interval (smaller margin of error), you have to sample more pages. Unfortunately, the required sample size is inversely proportional to the square of the desired precision, so it can get very large. For example, to get an interval that's only 2% wide (1% margin of error, or approximately ten times more precise than the interval we just got), you need to randomly sample about 100 times more pages (i.e., 10,000 pages — or, if you use a more precise calculation, 9,604 pages). A more reasonable goal is a 3% margin of error, which would require about 1,068 pages. Of course, all of this is for 95% confidence, which is basically the default level people use for this kind of thing. If you want to be more or less confident, that'll change the required sample size — but not as much as changing the desired precision. (Just yell if you want more information about this.) - dcljr (talk) 23:05, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
BTW, 385 pages would give you a 5% margin of error, which is probably what I'd do in your situation. (Of course, I could simply put myself in your situation and do it myself... but I don't want to. [g]) - dcljr (talk) 23:12, 24 June 2013 (UTC)
385 is a lot. But I'll try ;) PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:27, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

Categorization

Please see these discussions: Meta talk:Categories, MediaWiki talk:Newarticletext. PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:26, 9 July 2013 (UTC)

New uploader group

Apparently recently the above-discussed restriction of upload rights was implemented: [1]. Sorry if it was already reported, but I couldn't find anything about it. --MF-W 22:47, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Gadget fix needed

Where should I request a fix to a gadget? Specifically, MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js puts the [edit] link to the left of the page heading, whereas all other [edit] links are to the right of the section headings. en:MediaWiki:Gadget-edittop.js seems to work properly, but the code is very different. --Redrose64 (talk; at English Wikipedia) 10:41, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

{{edit request}} at MediaWiki talk:Gadget-edittop.js, perhaps. --Glaisher [talk] 17:39, 22 July 2013 (UTC)

Notifications coming to Meta

 
Notifications will inform you of new activity that affects you on Meta -- and let you take quick action.

Hi folks, I'd like to let you know that we plan to release our new Notifications service on Meta in coming days. This software tool will inform you about new activity on this site in a unified way: it notifies you when you have new talk page messages, edit reverts, mentions or links -- and is designed to augment (rather than replace) the watchlist.

The Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team developed this new tool (formerly code-named 'Echo') to help users contribute more productively to MediaWiki projects. Notifications were first released on the English Wikipedia in April 2013, and we're now ready to bring them to Meta and a select few other wikis, after extensive testing on enwiki and mediawiki.org.

For this first release, we have developed a set of notifications aimed at both newcomers and experienced users. These include:

  • Talk page messages: When a message is left on your user talk page. This replaces the former text in an orange bar stating "You have a new message from another user (last change)", and provides a smaller message indicator in the top right corner of your page.
  • Mentions: When your userpage is linked to, in a signed post, on a talk page;
  • Page links: when a new link is made to a page you created;
  • Edit reverts: When your edits are reverted;
  • Thanks: A small "thank you" for an edit;
  • User rights: When your user rights change.

We will post here on Babel as soon as this new tool is live, hopefully later this week. Please let us know if you have any questions. For more information, visit this project hub, this FAQ page or this testing page. Thanks, and stay tuned for more. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 00:56, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Aren't we allowed to chose whether we want it or not? I don't think I like the way Wikimedia is turning facebooky, and I guess there is little need to make meta more "social". Savhñ 01:15, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
@Savh: Cf. Wikiafication, but Echo does have some benefits. And you can't opt-out, FWIW. PiRSquared17 (talk) 01:20, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Soon we can all "thank" others for their useful edits! Because we couldn't before. And we can get others' attention with an abusive template - because we couldn't before. Brilliant. WMF always brings us such a progress. I wonder whether I will soon see lots of "MF-Warburg@metawiki changed your user rights from none to checkuser" everywhere I cu spambots! --MF-W 01:26, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I don't personally like the 'Thank' feature as it's a bit facebook-like, but I see some merit in it proving that an edit is of decent quality, and possibly more helpful when applied to the negative side as I described below. Gryllida 13:13, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
No you won't, in fact it will go to the wrong person entirely. See bugzilla:51418, which I believe blocks this deployment. --Krenair (talkcontribs) 01:46, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Based on some recent discussions I've read about WMF enabling new features, I doubt the WMF will delay deployment due to this bug. However, I would love it if someone were to fix this issue and/or delay the deployment until it can be addressed. PiRSquared17 (talk) 03:46, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
They actually did delay deployment. Thanks. PiRSquared17 (talk) 21:44, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I think the users can opt out of everything other than notifications for new talk page posts in preferences, making 'over-social spirit' a non-issue (in my view at least). But the notifications may be useful to new editors who may want to know what happened with their page or edit and I believe have to look into history manually. Gryllida 13:10, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Correct. You can choose which notifications you want and how you want them delivered (web vs. email) on a per-type basis. Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 17:43, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Most (active) users on Meta are already experienced on another Wikimedia project, not that we don't want to encourage new users to contribute here. PiRSquared17 (talk) 16:18, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
How is localization for this coming along? --Rschen7754 04:32, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Via translatewiki, as for all localization. See here to translate or here for the i18n file. Or change your language settings on enwiki temporarily and see what happens. --MF-W 13:08, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
  Oppose Even if this comment is useless. Meta does not need to be social-networked. We need useful tools to deal with spam, vandalism and abuse. Editors need useful tools to edit with more confort. None of this is provided by this. -- MarcoAurelio (talk) 12:43, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
I believe this same software can be slightly expanded to be capable of adding negative metadata to edits, not only 'thanks', and dispatch server-side warnings to vandals from there (instead of using templates). Gryllida 13:02, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Needless to say I agree. --MF-W 13:08, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
  • We're sent to a FAQ on en.wiki? O_o The main disadvantage of this is that talk page messages become very hard to notice and reach (there is no direct link and the email notifications are very mysterious), all the rest can be disabled. Just keep in mind that if someone doesn't reply to talk page messages they may have no guilt, or try to contact people on wikis where Echo didn't arrive yet. --Nemo 13:17, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
    I don't think this tool replaces the classic orange banner about new messages at user talk page. "No direct link" is a bug to be fixed, but as I'm not involved with bugzilla, personally. Gryllida 13:51, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
    Yes it does. As for the bug, it's filed in many variants and a fix was promised long time ago, I'm just commenting the current status. --Nemo 14:05, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
    See OBOD. PiRSquared17 (talk) 16:03, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
    Add something like mw.loader.load('//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Writ_Keeper/Scripts/orangeBar.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript'); to your JS file for the yellow bar. If you wish to see what's new, add your user page to the watchlist, then go to the watchlist and click on "history" for your talk page and the new posts should be highlighted. Alternatively, switch on e-mail notifications for watchlist changes and you should get diff links for talk page edits, provided that you are watching your own talk page. These tricks work on English Wikipedia at least. --Stefan2 (talk) 21:36, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
  •   Oppose per MarcoAurelio. Better fix some important bugs. --Base (talk) 14:54, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
    Well, to be fair, it's not like it's one against the other: Notifications is a feature that is already available, so allowing users to benefit from it now won't take time away from fixing bugs. guillom 14:58, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
You're quite wrong. It's like changing of configuration bug. We, in ukwn, have config-change bug unfixed for almost 2 monthes. I want it to be fixed rather than enabling this rubbish in here... --Base (talk) 14:15, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
  • Update 1: Hi folks, thanks so much for your prompt responses and thoughtful recommendations about deploying Notifications on Meta.
Our current plan is to make this tool available to all MediaWiki projects in coming months, as part of our core features. The tool has been generally well received by a majority of users on the English Wikipedia, where about 65% of survey respondents find the tool useful. But Meta users who don't want the tool will be able to change their preferences to turn off any and all email notifications, as well as most web notifications except for talk page messages and system messages.
However, an issue has come up which requires us to postpone this week's proposed Meta deployment to a later date. As kindly reported by User:Krenair, we need to revise the current 'user rights notification' on Meta, to prevent cross-wiki notifications from being sent to the wrong users. To that end, we are exploring a couple possible solutions: one option would be to disable 'user rights' for Meta (using a 'local config file') -- or to only send notifications for local user right changes on Meta (but not for other changes on other sites). These options are further detailed in bug 51418[2] (links from mw m w). Which option would you recommend?
Thanks again for your helpful feedback about this tool. Based on our extensive testing on enwiki and mediawiki.org, we are confident that Meta users will generally find the tool useful . We look forward to making it available on Meta very soon! Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Hello Fabrice, thanks for sharing the results of that simple survey (which of course doesn't replace scientific and statistically valid surveys nor consensus, but is useful); I've looked forward to them. I'd like you not to translate them into something that they don't say, though.
Those users said they received "notifications useful to you", not that the new tool specifically had been useful; in particular, it's obvious that talk page messages notifications are useful, but those are not something Echo added, rather it's something Echo made significantly less useful (so far).
Of the 773 respondents replying on how to make notifications better, at a glance I see an overwhelming majority of negative comments (among some enthusiastic ones and quite a lot of assorted junk, of course). I'm sure you'll sort those out and come back with more useful breakdowns of the response, but please drop this "65% of survey respondents find the [Echo] tool useful" nonsense immediately, the community doesn't like to be mocked at. --Nemo 19:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Do you mean all MediaWiki projects or all Wikimedia projects? I don't see how you're going to make other people install Echo. By the way, I would prefer just disabling it for cross-wiki rights changes - local rights changes don't have any problem. PiRSquared17 (talk) 20:06, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Apparently it was now decided to do that: Change 73990 merged by jenkins-bot: Don't trigger event when user rights change is cross-wiki or global. --MF-W 23:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC)

Question: I had thought I had read somewhere that Echo was also intended as an attempt at solving the problem with non-existing global watchlists. Now I read at bugzilla:51418#c14 that "cross-wiki notifications" are not possible. Is that just a description of the status quo, or is it intended to change that? (So that e.g. users can get notifications about rights changes from Meta; or even in such a way that every SUL account sees all his notifications from all wikis on all wikis in the list of notifications). --MF-W 23:28, 16 July 2013 (UTC) PS: To be precise, of course, all wikis = all WMF wikis.

Does Echo even support one-wiki watchlists? PiRSquared17 (talk) 23:45, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
Hello MF-Warburg and PiRSquared17, thanks for your good questions about Echo, the MediaWiki extension that powers Notification. We are investigating cross-wiki functionality for notifications, which we had initially hoped to address with this tool, but at this time we do not expect to develop this complex feature until we have a practical plan and more resources to take it on. We also decided early on in the Echo development that we would not attempt to include watchlist events in the notifications stack, because it would overwhelm the system with too many high-velocity events that may not be relevant to the user. So for now, our plan is to roll out the current version of Notifications to more wikis, and to hold off on any cross-wiki or watchlist notifications for the near-term. Does this answer your questions, or can I provide more information? Be well. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 16:38, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
I think we are sufficiently informed now, thank you. It's also important to know sometimes which features are /not/ imminent :) --MF-W 01:16, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
  • Update 2: Hello again. I just wanted to give everyone a heads-up that we plan to deploy Notifications on MetaWiki tomorrow, Thursday July 25 at about 4pm PT (24:00 UTC), if all goes well. We will update this post again once the tool is live on Meta, with instructions on how you can change your preferences to control which notifications you get on this site. Thanks again for your guidance in preparing for this deployment, which helped us revise the tool to only send notifications for local user rights changes on Meta. We hope that you will find this new tool useful. Stay tuned for more information tomorrow. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 23:42, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Notifications are now live on Meta

 
Notifications inform you of new activity that affects you on Meta -- and let you take quick action.

Hi everyone, I'm happy to announce that we just released our new Notifications service on Meta today.

This software tool notifies you about important activity that relates to you on Meta-Wiki: when you have new talk page messages, edit reverts, mentions, thanks or links on this site, a red badge will appear next to your user name, at the top of any page. Click on this red badge to see your notifications, as shown on the thumbnail to the right. You can then click on the notification of your choice to find out more and take action.

To learn more about Notifications, please visit this special Notifications FAQ here on Meta. It includes tips on how to get the most of this new service, as well as control which notifications you receive. If you would like to be notified by email, you can go to your preferences to turn on email delivery; and if you don't like a particular type of notification, you can turn it off in your preferences as well.

Once you've tested Notifications, please take this quick survey, then join the discussion on this talk page on English Wikipedia. You're also welcome to report any bugs here on Bugzilla. For more tips on how to test this tool, see this testing page.

The Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team developed this new tool (formerly code-named 'Echo') to help users contribute more productively to MediaWiki projects. Notifications were first released on the English Wikipedia in April 2013, and we're now thrilled to bring them to Meta as our next pilot site.

In coming weeks, we will be deploying Notifications on the French and Polish Wikipedias and a few other wikis, before making them available to all MediaWiki projects in the fall of 2013. If you are interested in getting Notifications for your project sooner, please contact me to discuss.

We hope you will find this tool useful. Enjoy ... Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 00:31, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

  • No, but:
    • The "blending-in" of the notifications (as shown in the image here) works only on Vector. On Monobook clicking the number opens Special:Notifications. Please fix that.
    • how to get rid of the confirmation thing for thanks? I don't confirm rollback either. --MF-W 00:57, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
"Blending-in" actually works for me on monobook. Vogone talk 01:06, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
MF-W, I assume you have got javascript disabled on your browser. Seems to work for me on all skins. And which edit did you thank me for? "MF-Warburg thanked you for your edit on [No page]." That's what I get. :/ --Glaisher [talk] 09:07, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
Of course I don't have JS disabled - it works in Vector and other JS stuff also works, like e.g. the logo vote script. I thanked you for the deletion request on Talk:Wikimedia Highlights, November 2012/ja. --MF-W 10:05, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
That explains the No page stuff. --Glaisher [talk] 10:07, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
I can confirm what MF-W said. I'm seeing this too. However, it does blend in when I click the icon if I'm already on Special:Notifications. PiRSquared17 (talk) 12:15, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
P.S. Actually, the second part isn't working anymore, but I could have sworn it was working that way earlier today/last night. So I can't get this thing to come up anymore. PiRSquared17 (talk) 12:17, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
It now occured to me that this might be because we have some custom JS which would break the function. However, I use the same code imported from my global.js on all wikis, and on enwiki and mw.org the blending-in works. Does it work for you, PiRSquared, with whatever JS scripts imported? --MF-W 13:34, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
Thanks, MF-W, Glaisher and PiRSquared17, for reporting this issue with Monobook! Though we are optimizing Notifications for Vector, we thought we had made necessary changes to support Monobook, which Ryan Kaldari worked on last month. If the current issues are preventing you from using this tool, please take a moment to file a bug here on Bugzilla, if you haven't already. Much appreciated! Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 18:59, 26 July 2013 (UTC)
bugzilla:52194. --MF-W 17:23, 28 July 2013 (UTC) PS: It was thankfully resolved! --MF-W 22:19, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

HTML Email Notifications are live

Hi folks, as discussed earlier, we have just deployed HTML Email notifications on MetaWiki. You can read more about this HTML Email feature here. Another related feature we also deployed today is this improved notification structure that makes notifications easier to read.

Note that you can control which email notifications your receive and how they are displayed in your Preferences page. For example, if you would like to get email notifications when someone mentions your name on a talk page, check the 'Email' box next to 'Mentions', then click 'Save'. Or if you would rather receive plain text emails instead of HTML emails, select 'plain text' next to 'Email format' and click 'Save'. Easy as pie :)

Please let us know how these new features work for you. We're particularly interested in feedback on how HTML emails work on your mobile phone. Can you see the notifications well? Is it easy to click on the notification buttons? If you experience serious issues, please report them here -- or on Bugzilla (screenshots welcome).

Next, we plan to release notifications on the French Wikipedia, then incrementally on other wiki sites throughout the next few months, as outlined in this Notifications Release Plan. If you are active on another Wikipedia project and would like to get notifications deployed on your site, please read the checklist on that page and contact me to discuss.

We hope that you will find these new features helpful. They are part of an overall initiative to improve the user experience on Wikipedia by modernizing some of our tools to better match the expectations of our users. We think that these new features meet that goal -- and look forward to enhancing them in coming weeks with your help.

Thanks to all the community and team members who helped make this release possible! We are particularly grateful to our lead developer Benny Situ for taking these two new features through the finish line today. Onward! Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 21:20, 30 July 2013 (UTC)

Error in banner in sv.wp

Hi. The banner (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:CentralNoticeBanners/edit/VisualEditor_deployment) has an extra "//http:" in the link i the Swedish translation making the link not work properly. I don't know how to fix it and hope someone can help me (and that I posted in the right place. - Averater (talk) 08:45, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

@Averater, I have left a message to the user who made that edit at User talk:Guillom#Central Notice. Hopefully, it will be fixed soon. :) --Glaisher [talk] 10:20, 31 July 2013 (UTC)
PiRSquared17 has fixed it. --Glaisher [talk] 15:43, 31 July 2013 (UTC)
Thank you, it works nice now. - Averater (talk) 22:35, 31 July 2013 (UTC)