Notifications/Release Plan 2013



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

In 2013, the Wikimedia Foundation's Editor Engagement team developed and released this new notification system on the English Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and MediaWiki.org. We encourage you to try out Notifications on one of these projects if you do not have it yet.

To learn more about Notifications, read this FAQ page, this project hub and/or Testing page.

Feature development has now ended for this project and we are now working on these next milestones:
 * release Notifications on most wiki projects by early November (see timeline below)
 * support the Notifications tool through bug fixes on all sites, as needed

Timeline
Here is our updated timeline for upcoming releases of Notifications in the second half of 2013.

For this and subsequent releases, we will aim to deploy to at least a couple dozen wikis per release, and keep increasing the number of wikis as we get the process refined. We also plan to have releases every two weeks with more sites, instead of weekly releases, as we have done up to now.

Phase 5

 * October 22 - All remaining sites.
 * 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)

(1) Though our plan is to deploy to most wikipedia sites, we may exclude a couple sites that have special needs, if requested by their communities. Please contact us right away if your community seriously wishes to postpone deployment.

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.

Completed
These releases have been completed.


 * Phase 4 - Oct. 8: Fourth group of sites (DONE)
 * 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 3 - Sep. 24: Third group of sites (DONE)
 * Catalan Wikipedia
 * Danish Wikipedia
 * Japanese Wikipedia
 * Kannada Wikipedia
 * Korean Wikipedia
 * Norwegian (Bokmål) Wikipedia
 * Telugu Wikipedia
 * Ukrainian Wikipedia
 * Vietnamese Wikipedia


 * Phase 2 - Sep. 17: Second group of sites (DONE)
 * 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 1 - Aug. 20th: First group of non-english sites (DONE)
 * 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)


 * Feature Development - First release and testing sites:
 * English Wikipedia (see metrics dashboard)
 * MediaWiki (released)
 * Meta-Wiki (released)

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.

More info
To learn more about Notifications, visit one of these pages:
 * Notifications FAQ
 * Notifications project hub
 * Notification Project Slides
 * Feature requirements page
 * Testing page (for trying out features in advance)

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!