Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Notifications, Watchlists and Talk Pages/Communicate local and global announcements through notifications rather than banners

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Communicate local and global announcements through notifications rather than banners

  • Problem: Global and local announcements are frequent, intrusive, sometimes irrelevant to the reader, and cause layout shifts.
  • Proposed solution: Allow for local and global announcements to be communicated through the notification system where it makes sense
  • Who would benefit: Everyone using Wikipedia.
  • More comments: This proposal is to allow for communications to happen through the notification system where it makes sense and not to replace banners. Communicating announcements through notifications would allow users to read them at their own time, without interrupting other activities. Furthermore, since Wikipedia doesn't overload users with notifications, and it's the user itself who clicks the bell icon to see the notification, it's possible that announcements communicated through notifications may be read with more attention than usual, therefore increasing their effectiveness.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Sophivorus (talk) 13:02, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Additionally, mobile site (m.wiki) users are never shown MediaWiki:Sitenotice, and that's more than half of all users. ponor (talk) 18:26, 27 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • That would make those announcements a lot harder to notice and read and somewhat defeat the purpose. There is a lot to be said IMO for improved banner controls so it's easier to keep track of what banners are running and limit how often the same user sees them (and to get rid of the overlapping system of local and global notices), but notifications are not the right mechanism for that. It would also require a major rewrite of both banners (CentralNotice) and notifications (Echo) which isn't really realistic. --Tgr (talk) 04:59, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Some mildly relevant CentralNotice tasks which might be easier to fix: T138572, T52865 --Tgr (talk) 06:40, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]
    Pinging the proposer @Sophivorus for their input. I agree it seems like this proposal may be focusing too much on a solution and less about the problem. There are several systems involved here, CentralNotice is one of them but some communities also use Geonotices. For a single proposal, it would be too much to ask I think to consolidate and solve them all. I also agree with Tgr that perhaps notifications aren't the best solution.
    Would you mind trimming down this proposal to something smaller, and focusing on the problem? Perhaps issues with CentralNotice, in particular (or one of the other systems if those are more important to you).
    Note we have until this coming Thursday to get this resolved. I'm sorry we're running so short on time! Another option is to leave this proposal as-is and move it to our Larger suggestions category so it can get the attention it deserves from leadership. Thanks and regards, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 23:53, 6 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Sophivorus: Since we didn't hear back from you I'm slightly modifying the proposal and accepting it. DMaza (WMF) (talk) 19:39, 9 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]
  • May I add that many sites and apps already communicate stuff via notifications, so it's not like we're proposing something new. Sophivorus (talk) 01:46, 12 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Voting