Help:Notifications

This is an information page. It is not an encyclopedic article, nor one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcuts WP:ECHO WP:PING H:NOTIFS

Notifications (formerly Echo)

Developer(s)	Wikimedia Foundation
Type	Notification system
Website	Notifications @ MediaWiki.org

Notifications (commonly called pinging, formerly known as Echo) is a system designed to inform users about new activity on Wikipedia in a unified way. It provides notifications to users for a number of events related to their account, including new talk page messages, edit reverts, mentions or links. It is intended to augment the Watchlist, by highlighting key user interactions.

Notifications are displayed to the right of the username and user talk links in the top link bar of the page for logged-in users, displaying two icons, each with a number representing the number of recent notifications. Email notifications can also be set up for some or all types of notification in Preferences.

You can "mention" a user called Example by making an edit with a link to their user page (writing [[User:Example]], {{u|Example}}, {{User|Example}}, {{User link|Example}}, {{Ping|Example}}, {{Yo|Example}}, or {{Reply to|Example}}) and signing the edit using four tildes (~~~~). The user "Example" will then get a notification saying where they were mentioned. This is sometimes called "pinging". See Help:Talk pages#Notifications for more information.

Before Notifications, the only notifications that the MediaWiki software provided were given through emailed notifications for changes to your watchlist, and an orange bar for changes to your user talk page. To learn more about Notifications, visit the project hub on MediaWiki.org.