All-new notifications page helps Wikimedians focus on what matters most
Until recently, wiki users haven’t had much reason to visit the Special:Notifications page. Outside of aggregating all your old messages, it didn’t do much.
Last week, however, the Wikimedia Foundation’s Collaboration team completed a round of major enhancements to the notifications system that included a complete rewrite of the notifications page. The page’s new design and tools make it a place where users can both get a broader overview of all their messaging activity, and narrow their focus to just the topics that interest them most. Here’s a quick tour of this new messaging hub—and a look at a few other new features that are making the notifications system more convenient and helpful.
View the whole wiki world: On the notifications page, you can now monitor messages from all the wikis on which you’re active. This “cross-wiki” capability has been available in the drop-down notification panels for a few months, but the panels display only a subset of the newest notifications and show only unread cross-wiki messages. On the notifications page, you can see your entire message history on a remote wiki—both read and unread—as if you were there
Narrow your focus: One of the most noticeable features on the new notifications page is the recent activity panel of filtering options on the left. The recent activity panel lists all the wikis on which you have unread messages as well as the individual pages that the messages are about. Clicking on a wiki name gives you access to all your notifications on that wiki (as described above). Clicking on a specific page enables you to focus in on a subject or discussion by accessing all your new and old messages about that page. Next to recent activity, another set of filters at the top of the notifications page lets you filter by read or unread message status—helping users surface older messages or concentrate only on what’s new.
A cleaner, more readable interface, with improved pagination and power tools for marking groups of messages as read, cap off a list of improvements that make this formerly obscure page into one that notification power users, in particular, will want to take a second look at. (To access that page, type “Special:Notifications” in the search bar or click on the “all notifications” link at the bottom of the notifications panels.)