Topic on Talk:Notifications

When deploying Echo at es.Wikipedia, Fremen asked if Echo could be used to follow pages beyond those you created, like the watchlist does. I thought that this was a bit unmanageable until he explained in detail what he was referring to. What he suggests is that Echo can be used to follow certain edits rather than all edits. He gave the example of Echo notifying a user when someone removed a category from a page off their watchlist, and I can also think of more examples, like when a page on your watchlist is moved, or deleted, or restored, or a revision within any of these pages is revision deleted.

Such enhancements will make Echo an even more powerful tool than what it is now, and will expand its usefulness by a broad margin. We can also explore, in the future, the possibility to make Echo to report users when a page off their watchlist received a maintenance tag, et cetera, but since these tags depend on templates that vary throughout the different wikis, that would be time consuming and may not be very useful (we still have the watchlist though). Any thoughts?

It is really good the community is thinking about new ways to use Echo notifications. The current set of notifications is really viewed as just the beginning, and in the future we hope more functionality will be added (by developers, by editors, etc.)

About specific notifications about certain page edits: we were really careful not to replicate a lot of the functionality of the watchlist. Once you go down the path of notifications like that, it gets confusing and muddled pretty quick. It's also not that easy to develop notifications like "notifying a user when someone removed a category from a page off their watchlist" on a per-user basis.

I would suggest that we start a wishlist, perhaps with bugs associated with them, if it doesn't exist already.

@Hahc21, those suggestions are definitely overlapping with watchlist functionality.

I suspect what you are really asking for, above, is: 2 (or more) watchlists, or a way to filter our watchlists, with different features for each, eg. 1 could be a high-priority watchlist (or filter) that sends an email for all changes.

w:Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Watchlist_changes links a few of the discussions about this. See also Watchlist wishlist here on Mediawiki.