Notifications/Release Plan 2013

Here is our 2013 release plan for the Notifications project (code-named 'Echo') and related tools.

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

The Wikimedia Foundation's core features team developed and released this new notification system in 2013, and it is now deployed on all Wikipedias and sister sites -- with very positive community response, as summed up in this blog post. To learn more about Notifications, read this FAQ page, this project hub and/or Testing page.

We have now completed this first release and core feature development has ended for this project. Going forward, any new features or notifications will be developed by teams that need them, based on this developer guide.

Timeline

Notifications Project Slides

Notifications have now been released on over 800 different sites worldwide, as shown in the timeline below and in this full site list.

• Phase 0 - Feature Development - May 1, 2013 - First release and testing sites
  • English Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • MediaWiki.org
  • Meta.Wikimedia.org

• Phase 1 - Aug. 20th, 2013: First group of non-english sites
  • French Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • Hungarian Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • Polish Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • Portuguese Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • Swedish Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)

• Phase 2 - Sep. 17: Second group of sites
  • Bosnian Wikipedia
  • Dutch Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • Estonian Wikipedia
  • Hebrew Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • Romanian Wikipedia
  • Spanish Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
  • English Wikivoyage
  • Simple English Wikipedia

• Phase 3 - Sep. 24: Third group of sites
  • Catalan Wikipedia
  • Danish Wikipedia
  • Japanese Wikipedia
  • Kannada Wikipedia
  • Korean Wikipedia
  • Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia
  • Telugu Wikipedia
  • Ukrainian Wikipedia
  • Vietnamese Wikipedia

• Phase 4 - Oct. 8: Fourth group of sites
  • Albanian Wikipedia
  • Arabic Wikipedia
  • Azerbaijani Wikipedia
  • Belarusian Wikipedia
  • Bulgarian Wikipedia
  • Chinese Wikipedia
  • Croatian Wikipedia
  • Czech Wikipedia
  • Finnish Wikipedia
  • Galician Wikipedia
  • Greek Wikipedia
  • Indonesian Wikipedia
  • Latvian Wikipedia
  • Lithuanian Wikipedia
  • Malay Wikipedia
  • Norwegian-Nynorsk Wikipedia
  • Serbian Wikipedia
  • Slovak Wikipedia
  • Slovene Wikipedia
  • Sorani Kurdish Wikipedia
  • Thai Wikipedia
  • Turkish Wikipedia
  • Welsh Wikipedia

• Phase 5 - Oct 22 Most remaining sites worldwide
  • Wikipedia (~200+ sites) (1)
  • Wikibooks
    • List of all language Wikibooks (121)
  • Wikidata
  • Wikinews
    • List of all language Wikinews (33)
  • Wikiquote
    • List of all language Wikiquotes (88)
  • Wikisource
    • List of all language Wikisources (63)
  • Wikispecies
  • Wikiversity
    • List of all language Wikiversities (15)
  • Wikivoyage
    • List of all language Wikivoyages (14)
  • Wiktionary
    • List of all language Wiktionaries (170)

(See full site list)

• Phase 6 - Nov. 20 - Final sites
  • German Wikipedia
  • Italian Wikipedia

Note that we will support these sites with initial releases and bug fixes, but are not planning to develop any new notification features this year.

To learn more about preparing Notifications for your site, please review the "Checklist" section below and contact us with any questions.

Checklist

Here is a checklist of actions to consider for any release of Notifications on a new Wikipedia or MediaWiki site:

• Discuss this release with your community, to let them know this tool is coming and invite volunteers to help with translations and other tasks on this list (see this example of how we announced it on Meta-Wiki).
• Check the Echo page on translatewiki.net to confirm that the interface and content has been properly translated for your language (be sure to translate the Thanks extension as well).
• Test the user experience on Meta-Wiki to see if it behaves as expected (change your preferences to your language and send yourself a few web and email notifications).
• Create a local version of this Notifications FAQ page and translate it in your language (please send us the URL, so we can link to it from the question marks in the tool).
• Create a local version of this Notifications Project page and translate it in your language (this is less important than the help page, so do that afterwards).
• Consider whether you need to make any special adjustments to notifications on your site (we recommend keeping the current settings in place, but you may be able to change some if needed).
• Leave any questions or comments on this discussion page -- and/or contact the Wikimedia Foundation's community liaison Keegan Peterzell (kpeterzell-at-wikimedia-dot-org) or product manager Fabrice Florin (fflorin-at-wikimedia-dot-org) to discuss any questions about deploying Echo on your project (note that special requests may delay your release).
• Please contact us right away if your community seriously wishes to postpone deployment of Notifications. Though our plan is to deploy to most wiki sites, we may exclude a couple sites that have special needs, if explicitly requested by their communities, with a strong rationale for why this release needs to be postponed on their site.

Features

Notifications offers many features that can be customized. The help page has an overview of the main features.

• Blacklists Using the MediaWiki:Echo-blacklist space you can opt-out particular users or bots from triggering Notifications.

You can find more about what Notifications supports at the features page.

More info

To learn more about Notifications, visit one of these pages:

• Notifications Blog post.
• Notifications FAQ
• Notifications project hub
• Notification Project Slides
• Testing page (for trying out features in advance)
• Feature requirements page

Once you've tested Notifications and discussed it with your community, please share your feedback on this discussion page or report bugs on Bugzilla.

Thank you!