Proposal:Article modification alert (done)

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Summary

This proposal hereby states that the creator of an article has the option to be alerted by e-mail if someone modifies the article they created. But that the current way of doing this is over-simplistic and would benefit from some extra options.

Done. On most wikis other than EN you can set your email preferences to do this, otherwise you can subscribe to article RSS/atom feeds with your favorite RSS/atom readers.

Proposal

This proposal hereby states that the creator of an article has the option to be alerted by e-mail if someone modifies the article created. This feature should be available per-article, as some articles may be unmodifiable or the creator is less concerned about abuse of said article.

Currently this can be done by requesting Emails for every item you put on your watchlist, the only choice being whether you want this and if so whether to ignore minor edits. However it might be useful to some users if they could choose:

  • To ignore bot edits.
  • To set a maximum number of daily or weekly emails, with the last being a digest rather than a separate email for each edit.
  • To be able to choose which items on your watchlist you want to be emailed about.

To resolve the issue whereby excess emails were being sent to EN wiki editors, the developers may well decide to set a maximum for the number of daily Emails that anyone can request.

Motivation

To prevent the abuse of articles/contributions on Wikipedia/Wikimedia


Key Questions

How can the community stop the abuse of some articles/contributions?

  • How does this differ from the current option in preferences "E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed"
  • If we move to a global watchlist would we lose the current functionality of being able to set preferences differently on each wiki?

Potential Costs

Too many emails being sent (is that a potential cost?) .

  • If editors or former editors decide they want to opt out of this service there is a risk that they do this by tweaking their spam filter rather than changing their preferences. This could be very bad for the delivery of our Email to other editors.

References

Currently the settings in

Preferences
User Profile

Include:

  • E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed
  • E-mail me when my user talk page is changed
  • E-mail me also for minor edits of pages

If you set the first and third on you will get an email for any change to any page on your watchlist (this has been disenabled on some wikis such as EN due to Email volumes).



Community Discussion

Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Article modification alert (done).

Want to work on this proposal?

  1. Vibhijain 14:56, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
  2. .. Sign your name here!