Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Notifications/Flow

General point: separation of content from discussion

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SMcCandlish (talkcontribs)

One thing that's bugged me about MW from day one is failure to separate the content (encyclopedia article, policy page, etc.) from the talk page about it in the watchlist system, at least without jumping through filtering hoops. They're really very different things from a human perspective. I would much rather be able to "subscribe" to a thread or an entire talk page, and have a discussions widget in the menu that showed me that stuff separately, and then be able to pare my watchlist down to nothing but content pages, and maybe a tiny handful of talk pages to explicitly treat as watchlist items for tracking any edits at all, e.g. ones that serve the purpose of noticeboards, or which are presently undergoing disruptive antics.

Nemo Le Poisson (talkcontribs)

+1

PPelberg (WMF) (talkcontribs)

One thing that's bugged me about MW from day one is failure to separate the content (encyclopedia article, policy page, etc.) from the talk page about it in the watchlist system...They're really very different things from a human perspective...

This is a sharp point, @SMcCandlish. Can you please expand on the differences between how you think about and what you need in a system for staying up to date about changes to content you are interested in and becoming aware of new activity in conversations you are interested in?

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Meta: you bringing attention to the distinction between content and discussion comes at a great time for we are thinking about this very point. More to come in the new topic I will be starting shortly.

SMcCandlish (talkcontribs)

Well, what I'm thinking of is the interface widgets at page-top: the alert/notice icons. Presently they're a random mix of content and communications-related stuff (in both of the icons). I would rather have one, maybe with an icon of heads talking to each other, that is all about talk-page activity (probably including pages not in talk namespace that have been configured to behave as talk pages, such as administrative noticeboards); and another one that is all about content (maybe with a pencil icon or something). The current "bell" and "letter tray" (I think) icons aren't really meaningful.

What we have now, at en.WP, is an Alerts icon, which has a bit of a confused purpose, showing pings (communications/messaging stuff), posts to one's own user talk page (comms), failed pings by you (meta-comms), reverts (content), "you've got e-mail" notices (comms), and I'm not sure what else.

Then we also have a Notices icon, which shows Thanks (comms), "The page X was connected to the WikiData item Y" (meta-content), notices that a page has been Reviewed (meta-content), and I'm not sure what else.

Very confusingly, both of these icons have "All notifications" and "Preferences" controls, that go to the same pages! And there is no way to determine which of the two categories any of these things should be in, and there are very few of them, mostly of weird stuff the average editor doesn't feel a strong urge to be notified about.

I think this is hopelessly muddled. My guess is that the idea was to use "Alerts" for "stuff we think you'll consider important" and "Notices" for "stuff we don't think you'll care much about", but this is wrongheaded, since different users care about different things, and there is no reason to have an interface widget devoted to non-important stuff anyway.

It would make much more sense to divide these between communications/messaging in one icon, and content plus meta-control of content, in another, with separate "all notifications" trackers and separate preferences. E.g., I might want to exclude Reviewed notices entirely, and mark WikiData notices as high-priority, and so on.

Then add ability to track more things to each, e.g. to "subscribe" to notices of new posts (something with a new sig and timestamp) to a talk page or even a specific thread at one, on the communication side. Or be notified of any changes at all to the content of a certain non-talk page. And whatever. I'm sure different people could come up with a dozen different things. One could start by seeing what the watchlists already have as options, and working them into the notification system as things that can be selected for notifications.

This would not make the watchlist obsolete. I have thousands of watchlisted pages, and if I'm in "Today is Watchlist Day" mode, I may spend all day poring over non-minor edits at all the billiards articles I'm tracking, or whatever. It's a convenient tool for many things, especially when one learns its filtering capabilities. But it is not a notifications system; it's a destination ones goes to. The extant notification system is mostly showing you reverts and pings and user-talk posts in one tab (i.e., that which is likely to trigger an adrenalin spurt!) and trivia we do not actually usually need any kind of interruptive notification of at all in the other icon. It would be better for both if important (not just potentially alarming) stuff could be made to produce continual streams in both icons, one focused on inter-editor communication and one focused on non-talk content (articles and policypages, basically). I would like these to be active all day long, not with rare blips in them.

This is not the only site with problems in this area. E.g. NexusMods.com has a single notifications icon, and it commingles mod upgrade notices (content) with notices that people have replied to your forum posts (comms), which is very unhelpful and frustrating.

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)
SMcCandlish (talkcontribs)

No, I have web notifications turned on for everything except "Successful mention" (which is the most pointless option in there), and "Page link" which would drive me nuts.

PPelberg (WMF) (talkcontribs)

The detail you shared in the comment above has helped me to more clearly imagine the frustration and confusion you alluded to in the original post – thank you for taking the time to write out this thinking.

Before responding to the suggestions you raised, I'd like to try articulating the issue you raised in my own words to make sure I've understood them correctly and then ask a follow up question in response...

Issue you raised

You find the purposes of Alerts and Notices to be unclear because the two icons/systems deliver similar notifications [i] and offer similar functionality.[ii]

Follow up question

@SMcCandlish, can you share what impact the current Alerts and Notices experiences have on you? For example, what do you feel/think when you arrive on wiki and notice the Alerts and Notices icons are illuminated?


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i. Alerts and Notices both deliver notifications about "meta" events. In the case of Alerts, you are shown a notification when a ping you attempt to make fails. In the case of Notices, you are shown a notification when a page you created was reviewed).

ii. The Alerts and Notices "drop downs" both contain controls for "All notifications" and "Preferences"

SMcCandlish (talkcontribs)

I don't think that really got at the issue. More like the following, with the most important points emphasized:

  • I find the utility of the Alerts and Notices interface options low, and their purposes unclear, because:
    • The two icons/systems deliver similar notifications and functionality.
    • They each commingle communications-related and content-related notices, instead of there being a clear division between them.
    • Their current division into two interface widgets appears to be on a basis of prioritization/importance, but that entire notion is hopelessly subjective, and is variable not just between editors but from day to day, even hour to hour, for a particular editor.
    • And There are too few notification options, and too few of the ones available now are very meaningful to most editors, especially compared to the filtering options available in the Watchlist.
  • But the Watchlist is not a notification system; it's a tool we can manually go to and manually filter. (Though, yes, there is an option to generate e-mail from it, if you want to be extra-mega-super-notified by a firehose of watchlist messages!)
    • The Watchlist and the Notifications systems need to get integrated/related better so that anything the Watchlist can track is something the Notifications system can notify about, and anything the Notifications system can track (that has anything to do with wikitext, in a content or a talk namespace) should also be a filtration option in the Watchlist.
    • If this were the case, then the Watchlist could even have options to turn a filtration option into a Notificiation type (automatically sorted as Content or Communications, depending on the page type to which they pertain). That's a pretty big feature idea, though. Still, it won't even be possible under the current system.
  • As a side matter, the Alerts and Notices interfaces both contain controls for "All Notifications" and "Preferences", but these are not actually divided between Alerts and Notices. "All Notifications" just dumps all Notices and all Alerts into one list, and "Preferences" does not distinguish in any way between which widget (Alerts or Notices) each of the few available options relates to.
    • Rather than fix this to separately control "Notices" and "Alerts", it would be better to have one interface widget for Communications messages and one widget for Content messages, instead of two widgets for a random and arbitrary mixture of both. The present ones, as far as we can tell, are distinguished and sorted only by the developers' guesses as to what they think an editor "should" think is important versus trivial. That is a non-useful approach because it is subjective and variable, and because if a type of notice really was categorically trivial, there would be no need to receive immediate notices about it, ever. That is, under the current division/sorting of these things, the "Notices" icon has no reason to even exist.
    • If a Content/Communications split, instead of an Alert/Notice split, were the new way it worked, then "All Notifications" and "Preferences" not distinguishing two notification types would become moot, because they would inherently already be distinguished as content vs. communications in nature, instead of needing to be artificially distinguished by some kind of prioritization guess.
    • PS: I don't care what they're called. It could be "Content Notices" and "Messaging Notices", or whatever. I think I suggested a pencil-and-paper icon for the one, and talking cartoon heads for the other, but I don't feel strongly about it.

To answer your direct question:

  • When I see that the "Notices" icon wants attention, I'm annoyed that there's probably-pointless junk I'm being notified about, though there is a chance it's a "Thank" in there which would be pleasant news. But I feel compelled to check it anyway, because there may be some WikiData thing that needs examination. Most of them don't (from my perspective), but some of them do, e.g. if they have possible w:en:WP:BLP implications. So, I can't really completely ignore this icon if I'm not in the mood for communications/social stuff.
  • When I see the "Alerts" icon turn active, I usually have an adrenalin spurt and can feel my blood pressure rise. Odds are that it is one of three things: I got reverted (and given my experience level, there's about an 80% chance that was a bone-headed move and I'm going to have to explain to someone why they're being a bonehead); someone has posted to my talk page, which is probably "drama"; or I have been pinged to a discussion, which is probably more drama. This bell icon is kind of apt, in a sense, because this icon going off does act like an startling and annoying alarm. (That might be less the case for someone who studiously avoids noticeboards and high-controversy topic areas.)

So, my thoughts and feelings about both icons are basically negative, on a daily basis.

It would be much better if we had one icon for communications-related stuff – and more things to track in that category, like posts to talk pages or even specific threads, that we want to track, plus social stuff like Thanks, e-mail notices, ping fail/success (if anyone even wants to track the latter), and so on. Then have a separate one for content-related stuff, again with more options – like "any non-trivial, non-bot changes to this page", "any changes at all to that page", "any anonymous IP changes to that other page", WikiData notices, Reviewed notices (which I would turn off, though others might want urgently to see those, especially if they work a lot on creating new articles), page moves/renames, listings for deletion, etc.

There are all kinds of things that conceivably could be tracked here. E.g., as someone with the Template-editor bit, I would like to see when a w:en:Template:Edit template-protected is used, anywhere (as a Communications-category notification, since they always go on talk pages). I have a thing at the top of my en.Wikipedia talk page that shows me these things, via a bot (but also mixes in tracking of changes to protection level at templates). But it would be better if these were available as Notifications, so I and other TE's would be inspired to act on them more promptly (I've seen it take over a week for one to be answered). Admins have even more categories of things like this that they could track this way, and it would be much more practical with Content/Comms split.

If we had these two Content vs. Comms categories of notices, and they were a mix of priority/importance/urgency (perhaps with different-colored bullets or something? maybe there could be a way to set priority levels on them in the preferences), from very important to just not-quite-trivial, then both icons would be useful every day (especially if they could be sorted to show most recent, the present only options, or also most urgent). Neither of them would inspire dread or annoyance, since the majority of both of them would be routine but also useful, and clearly split between "something is going on with content I'm tracking" vs. "someone or some thread may need input from me".

Whatamidoing (WMF) (talkcontribs)

I was just wondering about the opposite. There's a setting in the watchlist (one I don't use) that shows every edit to a page separately (I prefer seeing only the most recent). If you use the "expanded" list, you can see all the edits in reverse chronological order, or you can have them grouped by page. I was wondering whether that grouping should include the talk page, so that you could see the recent changes to the article right next to the recent changes to its talk page.

SMcCandlish (talkcontribs)

That could also be cool, for sure, as a feature to use sometimes. What I was getting at, really, is default behavior of the WL, and an interface widget devoted to discussion tracking. I don't want to reduce the possibilities in any way.

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