Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2013/June

Help test the new account creation and login
Hi all,

After many weeks of testing, We (the editor engagement experiments team) are is getting close to enabling redesigns of the account creation and login pages. (There's more background about how we got here and why ‎our blog post.)

Right now are trying to identify any final bugs before we enable new defaults. This is where we really need your help: for now, we don't want to disrupt these critical functions if there are outstanding bugs or mistranslated interface messages. So for about a week, the new designs are opt-in only for testing purposes, and it would be wonderful if you could give them a try. Here's how:


 * Go to account creation and add  to the URL, or just use this link
 * Go to login and add  to the URL, or just use this link

If you have questions about how to test this or why something might be the way it is, I'd definitely check out our step-by-step testing guide and the general documentation. Many thanks, Steven (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 26 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Hey Wikinewsies. Just a heads up that we're enabling these new versions today. Steven (WMF) (talk) 22:45, 29 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the notification. :) Tested it out once and looks good. --LauraHale (talk) 07:07, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
 * I'd the "huh-whut? This looks like a Facebook login" that someone mentioned on the blog post. But, it'll take just a handful of uses to not be bothered by that anymore.
 * The "Z-OMG! What's teh 'REASON' box?" remarks are amusing; it makes perfect sense to me, but I'm used to creating user accounts for others. --Brian McNeil / talk 07:17, 30 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks for telling us, Steven. I've just edited MediaWiki:Createacct-benefit-body2 so it says "news articles" rather than "pages". Wikidata changed "pages" to "items", although English Wiktionary hasn't yet changed theirs over to "entries". —Tom Morris (talk) 08:45, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Echo
Here's something we should discuss: should we ask the Foundation to enable Echo on English Wikinews?

Echo is a new notifications system that is in use on a number of Wikimedia wikis including English Wikipedia. It adds a small notification to the user link area and includes a number of notifications beyond simply that your talk page has changed. This includes notification when someone has mentioned you in the form of a wikilink. So if I typed User:Pi zero or User:Brian McNeil or User:LauraHale or whatever, it would notify those people that they have been mentioned on this page. This gives users an effective way to "CC" people into talk page threads and community discussions without having to formally notify them on their talk page. There's details at Wikipedia:Notifications.

A big change for Wikinews is that Echo changes the default email notification of users. If a user has a registered and verified email address, they must opt-out of email notification of talk page messages and other notifications rather than opt-in. There is, in my opinion, one important thing this will do: help us provide quick feedback to new users. If when articles get reviewed by reviewers, we made the review gadget automatically drop a notification on the person's user talk page, with Echo, they'd be auto notified by email of the success/failure of the review. If the review has passed, then that's fine. They get a nice email telling them that the article has been published, and they get a warm glow of satisfaction. If the review has failed, then them getting an email immediately actually gives them a chance to come and fix the issues. The sooner they know the review has failed, the sooner they can hop onto the wiki and fix the issues, and the higher likelihood that it won't go stale.

There are some things we may need to iron out with the developers: what the interaction is between Echo and LiquidThreads, for one. Whether it is possible to add custom notifications (like the Wikinews review process rather than the Wikipedia review process). But subject to reasonable answers to these questions, I think Wikinews would benefit in having the new notification system Echo. Thoughts welcome. —Tom Morris (talk) 21:29, 24 June 2013 (UTC)