Well, I tried fixing this and related pages, but some of my changes were reverted, like here. Here's my understanding: in 2016, there was a big push to try to get the functionality of the Echo extension into core MediaWiki, where it would be a feature called "Notifications". For whatever reason, this didn't happen - but the documentation remains more or less frozen at the 2016 state, so that the merge into MediaWiki has, for the past eight years, remained forever just around the corner. This is extremely confusing, especially to new users. Imagine hearing about the Echo extension, typing in "echo", and ending up here - at a page that does its best to convince the reader that the Echo extension no longer exists. I hope someone can fix it - apparently it won't be me, but that's alright.
Topic on Talk:Notifications/Flow
That's definitely an improvement (thank you), although I still find this page confusing. The text starts with this: "Notifications (formerly known as Echo) is an engagement tool ...". So the Echo extension provides a tool that used to be also called Echo, but is now called Notifications? Was anything in the code ever renamed from "Echo" to "Notifications"? None of this makes sense.
"So the Echo extension provides a tool that used to be also called Echo, but is now called Notifications?" - Yes.
"Was anything in the code ever renamed from "Echo" to "Notifications"?" - No, just the user-facing name, because "echo" was a non-intuitive name (especially for translators, but also for people who know English).
"None of this makes sense." - Naming things is hard.
I've named many things, so I'm aware of the challenges in naming, but in this case there already is a name: Echo (a great name, by the way), so that's not an issue. If the goal in calling it "Notifications" instead is to not confuse users, I think this has the opposite effect. People understand that the name of something is different from its functionality; they manage to deal with it fine for every other extension. Do you think the documentation for the Scribunto extension should actually be at the page "Lua modules", and should begin with the text "Lua modules (formerly known as Scribunto) is a feature ..."?
I don't think this series of changes is accurate. The move into core has been repeatedly thwarted, but is not frozen.
Thanks for responding. It's good to hear that a move of this functionality to core is still possible - I personally think that the functionality belongs in core. I don't think anything I wrote in the documentation contradicts that, though. Beyond that, the main problem I see with the current documentation is that it places most of the content about the Echo extension not at Extension:Echo or Manual:Echo but at a page called Notifications - a page which then compounds the confusion by telling the user that Echo was renamed to Notifications.
Yes, the plan vaguely is to expand this page as the other notification systems (ENOTIF, etc.) are killed off and merged into Echo/Notifications, but they can't happen until the merge happens (as otherwise key features of MW suddenly go missing if someone installs from git rather than the tarball).
Would you agree that, until this merge happens, the current documentation is misleading?
No. I would say that your edits made it mis-leading, though.
That's an odd thing to say, given that some of my edits are still up. Anyway, I've heard directly from potential users of the Echo extension who thought that it no longer existed, because of the wording on this page. Which is not surprising in the least - I still have no idea what "Notifications (formerly known as Echo)" means.
I really hope these comments of mine didn't cause the Echo extension to just be renamed to "Notifications"! In my opinion, "Echo" is the much better name - more graceful and less ambiguous, not to mention the fact that it's contained in every setting name, DB table name, etc. I hope you reconsider.