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Edit milestone notifications are boring
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Description

Currently we only notify users when they make 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, ... edits. Boooo. Boring. Death to decimal-centric notification system.

For example, my fitbit gave me "London metro" badge after walking 402 kilometers (length of London underground). It has more like that (42km for Marathon badge, 112 km for Penguin badge, 563km for Hawaii badge, etc.).

We could have some notifications on top of the current decimal ones: (suggestions)

  • 42 edits: obviously.
  • 118 edits: Number of chemical elements
  • 272 edits: Number of London underground stations.
  • ... (suggestions welcome)

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I love the idea of adding in more interesting edit milestones. It would also be interesting to A/B test at some point to learn more about the impact of these notifications.

Somewhat related: the Growth team ran some experiments recently with adding in two different types of edit milestones for new editors:

  • notifications to "keep going" or "get started"
  • post-edit messages to "level up" or "try a suggested edit"

Designs and project info: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Positive_reinforcement#Leveling_up_3
Experiment results: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Growth/Positive_reinforcement#Levelling_up_experiment_results

There were some decent experiment results:

We find that the notification leads to a significant increase in newcomer activity in the week following the notifications being sent. Newcomers are more likely to return and make an edit, which also increases the average number of edits made during that week.

I don't think Growth can pull in this work immediately, but I do hope eventually we can consider tasks like this when we refocus on Positive Reinforcement improvements.