Help talk:Notifications

A useful notification

If the system of notifications is still being improved, please consider this suggestion: recently an editor, acting in good faith and unbeknownst to me, prematurely moved a draft from my user space to article space.[1] It would have been useful if a notification had been sent to me and I think it would be prudent in all cases where a user moves a user subpage from another's user space if the user hosting the subpage was notified. Thank you.--John Cline (talk) 05:40, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

@John Cline: I've filed phab:T296955 to contain this idea and link to related requests. The Notifications extension is not currently being actively worked on by a specific team at the Foundation, but adding a new notification-type can hypothetically be done by any volunteer-developer (AFAIK). Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

It helps greatly, that you've given of your time to answer, and endorse this as potentially worthwhile. Best regards and be well.--John Cline (talk) 21:29, 2 December 2021 (UTC)

Semi protected edit request

In Help:Notifications#Toolbar icons:

The first badge (red, "alerts") contains most more important notification types: new messages on your talk page, mentions, etc.

172.112.210.32 (talk) 04:10, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

 Done Thank you, - FlightTime (open channel) 04:14, 5 December 2021 (UTC)

Notifications for links to pages you didn't create

Is there a way to receive a notification when someone links to a page you didn't create? There are a couple I didn't create but contributed significantly on and it would be nice to be notified.  DiscantX 00:15, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Seconding that. It would be really good if there were a way to set your preferences on a page-by-page basis. I've created a large number of disambiguation pages and I find it annoying to get notified each time someone is foolish enough to link to one or another of them. – Uanfala (talk) 00:35, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Uanfala Opt-out is possible to do already! Two possible methods: (1) click the "..." link within the notification itself, which will then show a button for "Mute link notifications for 'pagename'", (2) type in the names of pages in the box at the bottom of Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo. Hope that helps! Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:17, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

Whoa, so obvious and I have missed it! Thanks! – Uanfala (talk) 22:16, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@DiscantX That is not currently possible. There's a feature-request for it at phab:T66090 (I've added mention of this new thread). Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:13, 23 December 2021 (UTC)

@Quiddity (WMF) Thanks for the response and for adding the mention. Cheers,  DiscantX 05:12, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

Section on syntax of ping to be added?

I am a casual editor on WM (and often focus on other things heavily for extended periods). So I know about ping, but would need a place to look to refresh about exact syntax of use (like in a refference manual). I looked in the article and into FAQ (not reading through, but skimming and with page search of browser), and failed to find an example of ping usage.

For a new user (or such as me) either a section of a referrence to help article on ping template could be welcome, if it doesn't exist yet; if it exists it might need to be made more "findable". If I encounter this info now, I'll add, if not, help of others would be welcome. --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 11:47, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

To find the info I needed I had to trace through a request for deletion of ping template discussion in archives, and through Help:Fixing failed pings, which was not very direct path. It seems {{ping}} template is a shortcut for {{reply to}} template, and this link to it's documentation includes syntax. I propose this (or better) link to be included in the article. --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 13:02, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

Additional info is, that what to me comes as "syntax" in doc on link above is in section Template:Reply to/doc#Usage. --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 13:29, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@Marjan Tomki SI: That's normal for Wikipedia template documentation - we are an encyclopedia for everybody, not just computer programmers. So we use everyday language, not geekspeak. Indeed, if you create a documentation page for a template that doesn't already have one, it's pre-filled from Template:Documentation/preload which explicitly includes the heading "Usage". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:15, 29 January 2022 (UTC)

@Redrose64: Thanks for comment, but the problem was that I followed a sizable link sequence from search for ping (which defaulted to search in WP articles, with more than one chunk of 500 interesting, but not relevant at that moment, hits) to Help:Notifications.

I modified search to look into WP help only, and got 3 hits, of which one was "Help:Notifications (redirect from Ping)" here, where I found (and still find) no Usage section.

That's why I tried to search for alternative terms, of which one was syntax (which came from my early linguistics training around Latin, not programmese, a couple of decades before first of programming languages - and even more before several formal language(s) of mathematics, and even more before the idea about general and interdisciplinary theory of languages - entered my language set).

It might be usefull to add a Usage section to Help:Notifications, with at least link to Template:Reply to, where I did find usefull (for the problem of the time) Usage section.

I might be bold, but I chose not to act boldly when I am aware I am not competent yet about consequences and conventions, so I first propose here on this talk page

• what was the problem and
• what change might help aleviate it,

and expect somebody already had a better solution I can be notified about ;-). --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 17:56, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

The template is named {{reply to}} and unfortunately {{ping}} is a redirect to it. I say "unfortunately" because one thing that the template doesn't do is to perform a ping. The term "ping" became a buzzword some time ago, used by people who either misunderstood its real meaning, or didn't know that it had one. What the {{reply to}} template does is to create a link to a Wikipedian's user page, preceded by an at-sign and followed by a colon, all wrapped in a <span class="template-ping">...</span>. That's all - and don't be misled by that span element, it does nothing; so all that there really is a fancied-up link.

For a "mention"-type notification to be sent to a user, either of two things must be done:

• you make a post in which three things must all occur in the same edit: (i) one or more new lines of text are added to the page, any one of which must (ii) contain a link to the user page of the person to be notified, and (iii) end in your own signature as generated by signing with four tildes. I've done that with this edit, and here is the link that will trigger the notification.
• you place a link to the user page of the person to be notified in an edit summary

The common factor is the link to the intended recipient's user page. No templates are necessary in either case, although they are often used for the first. Indeed, the {{reply to}} template was created after the notifications feature went live in 2013. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:26, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

@Redrose64:Thanks for nice and concise info about template.

• @ping: this word, and connected contexts where it is used, are a lot broader; and ping (and synonims) have different meanings in each, and area of that is heavily interdisciplinary (let's leave that aside for now). Internet ping you assumed relevant in this case was named after naval sonar ping (as I suppose you knew), which was etymologicaly onomatopoetic.

But here IMO pager ping meaning was used (also onomatopoetic, now mostly but not completly,replaced by SMS on portable - inlcuding pre-"smart" - phones). It's primary function was to just attract attention to something. If I were calling attention to a piece of discussion to several (including not yet involved) people, not only the person I was possibly replying to only, linguistic asociation to replying to everyone would be wrong, because you can't reply to somebody that hadn't already communicated with you. Even when one has, you might initiate a new discussion, possibly on new topic, and that is really not a reply also. That's probably why ping buzzword is used so often, and in those meanings, IMO, correctly.

• The problem I am addressing here is of possibly modifying contents of Help in such a way that info on {{reply to}} (usage - how to do it, not only when it is applicaple or how it works) can be found easily and intuitively for next novice searchers.
• Now I also found all relevant info in WP:MENTION; which redirects to correct part of this help article, but seems less than useful (for a novice; IMO adding examples of use would help, or link to Template:Reply to/doc#Usage where expamples exist; and for reasons of search problems mentioned above with word Usage somewhere nearby). In my cse, I had to make several unsuccesfull tries first (e.g. {{ping|talk:User}} and {{ping|[[talk:User]]}} didn't work for reasons that became obvious after testing, but were not after reading relevant section of help initially).
• That section also wasn't found easily. When this help article was shown in search (see above), I also had to read Help:Notifications article through focused to find relevant section WP:MENTION; when only skimming it I missed mentions of ping and reply to templates completly, and while doing focused reading this article of course I had to dismiss from focus of my mind what I did when I encountered "minor" problem of how to correctly use ping/reply to. Also, for a regular editor {{template}} symbols and their meaning are obvious, for a novice are not (and link to explanation of that might be usefull).

Does already exist something like referrence manual for such things? Or something on that in FAQ? And either in a way that search would find and show exact topic in article (not whole help article only like here, but Mention section in particular)? If this is not the place to discuss that, where to address it? Some project about help? --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 06:56, 11 February 2022 (UTC)