The visibility of notifications across wikis opens a lot of possibilities in terms of user preferences and the needed degree of control. For example users may found useful to get Wikipedia related notifications from the different wikipedia language editions they participate in, but they may find it distracting to get notifications from Commons.
Aspects to consider:
- The impact of unwanted cross-notificatons. Because of bundling, getting cross-notifications does not crowd the users notifications panel. It just adds one more notification item (that can be discarded). It has however, an effect in the notification counter.
- Managing settings on different wikis. Providing may detailed options on each wiki may result in a high flexibility but it may become impractical to adjust if the user is required to move across many different wikis and keep the global state in his/her head.
Some scenarios
Some initial scenarios were discussed, more needs to be analysed in this area:
- Use case 1: I’m on frwiki, get notified from Commons that my image was used on arwiki; I find these notifs spammy and don’t want to receive them anywhere, even on Commons.
- This doesn’t need to be a global preference if you’re okay with never seeing these notifications. It’s just a cross-wiki POST request to a specific wiki
- Can be integrated à la volume control (T115264)
- Use case 2: I find a notif type that’s off by default, like it, want to switch it on, don’t want to go through 900 wikis to do it.
- Use case 3: I don’t want to see notifs from Commons except when I’m on Commons
- (should we support this?)
- Use case 4: I want to mute all external notifications on a specific wiki
- Could be addressed by keeping beta feature pref around (but probably not as a beta feature)
See also: