Beta Features/New Features



This page is a staging area for product teams who wish to add new experiments to the Beta Features project.

We invite product owners who would like to experiment with a new feature to add it to this list, and answer these questions:
 * 1) What is this feature? Describe its main purpose and function.
 * 2) What will happen when this feature is enabled through this Beta Features tool?
 * 3) If replacing an existing feature, which, and what will the differences be to a user?

To get the ball rolling, we've listed the first features which we are considering for this project. Please fill in answers to the questions for each feature, and add any other features which you would like to test through this project.

For more tips on how to prepare your feature for inclusion Beta Features program, check the Package page.

VisualEditor

 * Purpose: Enable the basic version of VisualEditor on sites that have it enabled for opt-in. This option is not available on sites that have VisualEditor enabled for all users already.
 * Functions: VisualEditor provides a WYSIWYG-like rich text editor that lets you edit most MediaWiki content, including templates, references and text. More features are being developed, and will be enabled as other Beta Features during testing before being rolled out to all users.
 * Effect: When enabled, VisualEditor provides a second editing tab, labelled "Edit" (or "Edit beta" on the English Wikipedia), and relabels the existing editor for wikitext to "Edit source".
 * Links: Info | Discussion
 * Team: James Forrester and the rest of the VisualEditor team.

VisualEditor - Formulae editing

 * Purpose: This is a VisualEditor plug-in that lets you create and edit mathematical formulae.
 * Functions: Once opted-in, you will get a new item in the "More" section of the toolbar, currently labelled "LaTeX" and showing a Sigma as its icon ("Σ"). Similarly, existing formulae will now get a Sigma icon when you select them.
 * Effect: Clicking the icon will pop up an inspector to insert a new formula or edit the existing one, which takes a LaTeX expression (like the existing  system – for example, enter "e^{i\pi}" or "f(x)=3^x"), and updates the image of the formula.
 * Links: Info | Discussion
 * Team: James Forrester and the rest of the VisualEditor team.

Typography update

 * Purpose: Makes text more readable and beautiful, to benefit readers and editors alike. This beta feature uses serif headings for sections and sans serif for body copy to clearly differentiate them from body paragraphs, for a better visual experience that works consistently across desktop and mobile platforms.
 * Links: Info | Discussion
 * Team: Mobile team (Product Manager: Kenan Wang; Developer: Jon Robson; Designers: Vibha Bamba, Jared Zimmerman)

Media Viewer

 * Purpose: Improve your multimedia viewing experience with this new tool, which displays images in larger size on pages that have thumbnails. This viewer also aims to reduce confusion by only showing key information, with a link to the file info page for more details.
 * Functions: The key functions of this feature include a lightbox view and a full-screen view.
 * Effect: This will display the lightbox view when you click on a thumbnail for standard image files supported by this first version
 * Links: Info | Discussion
 * Team: Multimedia team (Product Manager: Fabrice Florin; Developer: Mark Holmquist; Designers: Pau Giner, May Galloway, Jared Zimmerman)

Better Interlanguage Links

 * Purpose: With the current list of interlanguage links, users have to process a long list of languages looking for their languages of interest time after time. We can make the language list shorter by including only the languages which are relevant to the user.
 * Functions: The feature provides a short list of languages to anticipate user selection. Based on previous selections, user location and browser preferences, we can surface the languages of interest for the user without the need of additional configuration. In addition, it allows users to easily select the rest of languages for which content is available with a searchable list of languages from the Universal Language Selector.
 * Effect: Users will be able to identify and switch between their languages more easily.
 * Links:
 * Info | Discussion
 * Prototype showing the idea.
 * Usability testing recordings. To see how users will switch languages.
 * Universal Language Selector. Extension that provides already most of the needed pieces (language selection list, cross-language search, and identification of likely languages).


 * Team: Pau Giner (design)

Compact Personal Bar

 * Purpose: As additional features are added to the site the contents of the "Personal Bar" has become extensive, extensions, preferences, and gadgets can also additional items, furthering the problems of finding what you need quickly, due to the proliferation of targets here, targets that users are most interested in like watchlist and notification are becoming harder to access quickly. Compact Personal Bar seek to solve these problems as well as provide a logical place for new items to be added as needed.
 * Functions: An organized flyout of the contents of the MediaWiki "Personal Bar"
 * Effect: The "Personal Bar" at the top of the site with access to profile, notification, preferences, log out, etc will be collapsed into a flyout menu with logical grouping at take up less space on screen.
 * Links: info | discussion
 * Team: Juliusz Gonera, May Galloway, Jared Zimmerman

VE on Flow

 * Purpose: The first release of Flow will allow users to type in markup. Future releases may also have the option to create posts using the Visual Editor. We want to pilot this functionality using the Beta Features experimentation space.
 * Functions: Add a VE bar to the compose post screen in Flow. Allow users to add bold, italics, links, and possibly some other features of VE to their posts.
 * Effect: Users will be able to compose Flow posts using VE instead of markup.
 * Links: none yet
 * Team: Core features – PM: Maryana Pinchuk; Devs: Erik Bernhardson, Matthias Mullie, Benny Situ, Andrew Garrett

Fixed Site Header

 * Purpose: Allow access to existing and new site functions irrespective of scroll position on page, especially search.
 * Functions: what are the key functions of this feature?
 * Effect: Site header will remain fixed to the top of the browser when the user scrolls down the page
 * Links: User CSS for fixed navigation in vector skin
 * Team: Brandon Harris

Annotations/Community Highlighter

 * Purpose: Highlight important content and comment on it
 * Functions: Allow individual users to store and view public annotations on articles. See most common highlights directly on page.
 * Links: Extension:Annotator
 * Team: Richa Jain (GSOC), Matt Flaschen, Steven Walling

Nearby Articles

 * Purpose: Allow discovery of geographically nearby articles from existing articles with geolocation metadata.
 * Functions: Adds access to nearby articles at the top of article pages
 * Links: info | discussion
 * Team: Jon Robson

Wikify Everything

 * Purpose: Support browsing by making all article text link to existing articles
 * Functions: make all text ngrams link to existing pages on wiki, but don't style text as links (too visually busy)
 * Links: info | discussion
 * Team: Up for grabs!

In coming days, please take a moment to fill in the blanks for these features, as well as start writing copy and preparing graphics, as well as links to overview and discussion pages for each feature.

To see a preliminary version of this tool, create an account on this prototype site, then log in and click on 'Preferences > Beta features'. Here is a screenshot of how it works now in its barebones form (please ignore the placeholder copy