This proposal is a larger suggestion that is out of scope for the Community Tech team. Participants are welcome to vote on it, but please note that regardless of popularity, there is no guarantee this proposal will be implemented. Supporting the idea helps communicate its urgency to the broader movement.
Problem: Other than the Watchlist which supports live updates, MediaWiki is severely in lacking AJAX-based real-time features, making it rather painful to participate in discussions where new comments are being made in quick succession, among other issues.
Proposed solution:
Echo alerts and notifications should automatically refresh without a reload/navigation being required – so that users are notified in real-time when discussions they are following have new messages, or when they are pinged. (phab:T34284)
Browser-based push notifications should be implemented for Echo alerts and notifications – so that users are notified even if they just have Wikipedia open in one tab but are working on something else. (phab:T113125 / phab:T276409)
On talk pages, visual indicators like "There are x new comments in this section. Click to reload" could be added (this is currently provided by Convenient Discussions gadget, but could be made more broadly available)
Page history could show an indicator if new edits are made to the page while user is viewing. (phab:T298419)
While viewing the latest diff or permalink of a page, if a new edit is made, there could be a indicator that the content is no longer current. (phab:T295225)
Create an abstraction (such as via polling or EventStreams or WebSockets) that can be used to implement all of the above. It will also empower extension developers to integrate similar features. (phab:T146032?)
I general, broad proposals like these are good for support votes, but in my experience will get rejected as too big/unspecific by the team. I'd just split it in these individual features you gave as an example. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:04, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This approach was suggested by @Trizek (WMF) in phab:T294382#7474807. The main part would be coming up with a generic framework for real-time notifications, after which the implementation of specific use-cases mentioned above could be left for other teams or volunteers. SD0001 (talk) 03:44, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
@SD0001 THAT is the line you should start that proposal with, in my opinion. Not just all the features that it will (eventually) unblock (because those are not all gonna be delivered within a single wishlist project, not possible). —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:01, 13 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Hello there, and thanks for your proposal! As TheDJ mentioned (Thank you @TheDJ!) this is a larger ask in nature, and unfortunately while it's a collection of sound ideas, they're too big for our team. We still believe in the importance of letting other participants indicate the extent to which they support this. We are therefore moving this to Larger Suggestions rather than the Archive. Thanks, NRodriguez (WMF) (talk) 13:00, 21 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]