I'm not sure linking to Special:Notifications is a good idea at this time, because going there still marks all notifications on that wiki as read. There's a patch that removes that behavior, but there's disagreement about whether that patch can be merged before T115528: Turn the cog icon into a menu is addressed more fully.

In T127419#2067327, @Catrope wrote:

I'm not sure linking to Special:Notifications is a good idea at this time, because going there still marks all notifications on that wiki as read. There's a patch that removes that behavior, but there's disagreement about whether that patch can be merged before T115528: Turn the cog icon into a menu is addressed more fully.

On the one hand, I agree that automatically marking notifications as read is a problematic side-effect of the Notification Page.
On the other hand, in the current Notification Panel we are already providing a link to the Notification Page through the "all notifications" link.

So I don't have a strong opinion on whether to wait for T115528 or not (if we decide to wait, let's add it as blocker for this ticket to capture that).

Change 288738 had a related patch set uploaded (by Mooeypoo):
Link project labels in xwiki bundle to their Special:Notifications page

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/288738

When there is only one foreign source, we don't show its label. Should we show it now that it has a specific purpose?

In T127419#2296982, @SBisson wrote:

When there is only one foreign source, we don't show it's label. Should we show it now that it's label has a specific purpose?

I'd support showing it. Especially since we moved the wiki names to be part of the excerpt, it makes it less obvious which is the wiki the notification comes from in the absence of the label.

Change 288738 merged by jenkins-bot:
Link project labels in xwiki bundle to their Special:Notifications page

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/288738

Checked in betalabs - below is the description of the current behavior (the testing scenario was created with consideration of @Pginer-WMF and @SBisson comments).

1. A user has only one foreign alert - the label is shown.

2. Clicking on 'Chinese Wikipedia' label (on the previous screenshot) - "oo-ui-buttonElement-button" will redirect a user to http://zh.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Notifications with the Alerts badge still displaying as red.

Viewing Special:Notifications does not mark alerts/messages automatically as read anymore.

Elena writes:

Viewing Special:Notifications does not mark alerts/messages automatically as read anymore.

The items should remain unread. They should, however, become "seen." Which means the badge should change to gray.

It seems likely this will be fixed by a new ticket Pau opened today: T136576 Mark as seen notifications from the Notifications Page. I'm moving this ticket back to QA. Please re-check once T136576 is resolved. (I tried to mark that as a blocking task but Phabricator wouldn't let me.)

Checked in betalabs - wiki names in cross-wiki bundles now are links, e.g. mw-echo-ui-subGroupListWidget-header-row-title for 'Catalan Wikipedia' will redirect to Special:Notifications page via the following link:

href="http://ca.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:Notifications"

• The specific issue described in the ticket is resolved - the wiki names are a clickable link directing to Special:Notifications according to the wiki label clicked.

• T136576: Mark as seen notifications from the Notifications Page is 'In Development' and has a note referring to this ticket, so testing will be done with re-checking this issue for regression etc.