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[SPIKE] Why are people notified about every edit to their user talk pages?
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

In T286954#7315586, @matmarex entered the potential that people being notified about every edit that is made to their user talk page as being unhelpful.

This ticket involves the work with learning the answers to the ===Open questions below so that we can decide whether there would be value in revising what kinds of edits to their user talk pages people are notified about.

Open questions

  • For what reason(s) are people notified about every edit that is made to their user talk pages?
  • What workflows and or tools have emerged that now depend on people being notified about every edit that is made to their user talk pages?

Done

  • All ===Open questions are answered and documented

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

@ppelberg In my opinion, the fact that you get notifications for every edit to your user talk page, rather than only for comments, is a bug

It’s definitely intentional, otherwise there was no nominornewtalk user right (assigned to bots). I personally consider this a feature, as any heuristics that tries to tell comments and other edits apart is inherently only up to 99% correct, and missing a talk page message because the sender forgot to open a new section and to sign it would be really unfortunate.

Yeah, maybe I shouldn't have said that it's a "bug". It can't be avoided as long as talk pages are just wikitext. I dislike that you can get an email about a typo fix on your talk page, and I think in a perfect world that would not happen, but we probably can't do anything about this without risking losing some important notifications.