Thanks Fabrice, this sounds very good, especially getting custom notifications for commons events would increase the value of echo over existing means like watchlists a lot. Daniel On Oct 3, 2013 4:52 PM, "Fabrice Florin" fflorin@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hi folks,

We'd like to give you a heads-up about the upcoming release of Notifications (1) on Wikimedia Commons in coming weeks.

This software tool will inform users about new activity that affects them on Commons, in a unified way: for example, it will let you know when you have new talk page messages, edit reverts, thanks, mentions or links -- and is designed to augment (rather than replace) the watchlist. The Wikimedia Foundation's editor engagement team developed this tool (code-named 'Echo') earlier this year, to help users contribute more productively to MediaWiki projects.

Notifications were first released on the English Wikipedia in April 2013, and have now been successfully deployed on dozens of other wikis in different languages, including the Dutch, French, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese Wikipedias, to name but a few. Community response has been very positive so far, across languages and regions. Users are responding particularly well to social features such as Mentions and Thanks, which enable them to communicate more effectively than before. Learn more in our recent blog post (2).

We're now getting ready to bring Notifications to Wikimedia Commons and other sister sites, and are aiming for an October 22 deployment for our first release. This release will include some basic features shared by all other sites. Our multimedia team is also considering developing a few special notifications for Commons (e.g.: 'Your file was used in an article'), and we will start a community discussion about these ideas after our first release.

Please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions or comments about this new tool in this Village Pump thread:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Notifications_on_Com...

Thanks, and stay tuned for more.

Fabrice

(1) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)

(2) http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/10/01/notifications-launch-on-more-wikipedias...

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Fabrice Florin Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)

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Commons-l mailing list Commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l

Hi folks,

We'd like to invite you to join a discussion on Commons about our upcoming Media Viewer!

Media Viewer is a new feature that aims to improve the multimedia viewing experience on Wikipedia, Commons and MediaWiki sites, to display images in larger size and with less clutter. (1)

This feature is under development by the Wikimedia Foundation's new multimedia team (2), with the goal to have a first beta version ready for testing at the end of October 2013, as part of our new Beta Features program. (3)

Media Viewer was designed in collaboration with community members like you, through a series of discussions held over video conferencing, IRC and in person at Wikimania, in roundtables like this one. (4)

We would like to know what you think of this feature, to help us improve it over time, based on your feedback.

After you've read more about this feature, we invite you to join our online discussion on Commons. (5)

Hope to see you there!

Fabrice

(1) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Multimedia_Features/Media_Viewer

(2) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia

(3) https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features

(4) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Roundtables/Roundtable_3

(5) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Multimedia_Features/Media_Vi...

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Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fabrice_Florin_(WMF)