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. Once considered, proposals are placed in the archive.

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
Other Resources
 * 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: Demo | Documentation

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

Wikify Everything

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

Quick note: This would have to keep w:WP:Wikipedia doesn't use Allwiki in mind (a very old decision, connected to [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Build_the_web&oldid=318004 WP:Build the web] c.2002)