We assume that editors find "language link added" notifications annoying. We've annectodally seen or heard about this. Now, we would love to collect evidence, e.g. tickets, RFCs, and user interviews, to learn more about this.
Some statistics from a query @SuzanneWood-WMDE ran on enwiki in December 2025 showed that:
Language link added: 170341, 21.13% of total WB changes
Language link removed: 13440, 1.67% of total WB changes
This signifies that these queries account for a high % of the notifications, which are quite high volume (we assume) for editors, especially UWERs.
We would love to learn more about how editors interact with those notifications to identify the problems and opportunities in this area.
This ticket is a good starting point: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T224532. https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T224533 is also connected to our work area.
Here is a list of the assumptions we would like to validate (to be validated by UX):
- Editors find the language link added notification valuable/invaluable
- Some editors find them more annoying than others i.e. casual vs expert vs specific roles e.g. UWERs
- Editors ignore or block these notifications because of the level of annoyance it causes them
- Editors have found ways of working around the presumed annoyance