Making a null edit (different from a dummy edit) to a certain user's talk page makes the user receive a notification that he has a new message although that the null edit itself is not recorded in the user talk page history.
Steps to reproduce:
- Logout of your account.
- While logged out make a null edit to your use talk page. (The null edit edit is not recorded in the user talk page history as expected.)
- Log in back to your account.
You receive a new message notification. When clicking on the notification link, you are redirected to the most recent diff on your talk page (which is not related to the null edit itself).
Request:
- MediaWiki should be consistent about what it does with null edits. Since null edits are not recorded in history and they don't appear in watchlists, then they shouldn't trigger a new message notification.
Tested using Google Chrome 47 under Windows 8 on Arabic Wikipedia (arwiki)