Users can access notification preferences from the notification panel. Currently users can control which extensions they get notifications from and which channels to be used (web and/or email), but that only affects local notifications.
When notifications from other wikis are surfaced in the notifications panel, we need to decide how much control users have on which ones get shown there.
Aspects to consider
Some of the aspects to consider:
- Control level. How much control do users need to show/hide external notifications.
- No control. External notifications are always displayed (users may control individual extensions in each wiki as they do now).
- Overall disablement. Users can chose whether to display external notifications or not.
- Filter by origin. Users can chose the visibility of notifications based on the wiki (or project/language).
- End to configure. Where are notifications configured from.
- Control the current project visibility elsewhere. That is, if I'm in Commons I can control whether notifications from Commons are visible elsewhere.
- Control other projects visibility in the local project. That is, if I'm on Commons I can control whether notifications from other projects (e.g., Wikipedia) are visible on Commons.
Scenarios
The right level of control depends n which are the common uses. Here are some possible scenarios:
- A user participates on English, French and Breton Wikipedia as well as Commons and Wikidata. When the user is on Wikipedia (in any language), the user is only interested in getting notifications from Wikipedias (in any language) but not from other projects such as Commons or Wikidata.
- A user participates on Commons, and three Wikipedias (English, German and Dutch). While on a specific wikipedia the user wants to focus on those notifications from the local wiki (not from other languages to avoid too many distractions) but the user also wants to get Commons notifications since they are volume and otherwise they can be missed since the user does not visit Commons regularly.
For example, below I illustrated a possible solution where users can control the visibility of other projects facilitating the selection of all and nothing, but also allowing a specific list of projects.
That is just a possibility, and depending on which scenarios are more common a different approach would be preferred.
In the initial iterations for cross-wiki support, the beta feature mechanism (T114237) will act as a general switch that users can use to control whether (all) cross-wiki notifications are shown (everywhere). Based on that initial solution, we'll get a better understanding on the different scenarios and the degree of control we need to provide.
See also: