Notifications/Developer program

This document is a work in progress. Comments are appreciated but this is not a final draft.

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

This page describes a proposed developer program for the Notifications tool (code-named Echo).

To learn more about Notifications, check out this announcement, this testing page, the feature requirements page, the metrics plan and other related documents.

Overview

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The purpose of this proposed developer program is to outline the set of tools, guidelines, policies and outreach which we want to provide to in-house and third-party developers for Notifications in coming months. While some of these program elements may be driven by the community (e.g. policies), others need to be driven by WMF (e.g. tools), as the legal entity responsible for these notifications on Wikimedia sites.

Notications is a very powerful tool, which can do a lot of good, but can also be very harmful, depending on how it is used. For example, we want to avoid situations where a rogue developer starts spamming millions of users each time someone edits a page on Wikipedia, without any recourse for end users, except turning off notifications completely.

In coming weeks, we will expand this document to outline key components of this proposed developer program.