Talk:Beta Features/Archive

Please share your feedback about Beta Features.

How to channel feedback?
I think that the intention is to gather as much quality feedback for the particular features as possible. Therefore we should promote links to feature descriptions, talk pages but I think we should also point to BugZilla components where some issues can be quickly filed; also a link to BugZilla existing issues isn't a bad idea either.

But below introductory text we have links that says:

About Beta Features | Leave feedback

I think we should get rid of them or at most embed them into the introductory text (for those who want more about WMF initiative). I believe we should be promoting particular features, not a particular WMF programme, which is irrelevant to 95% of users. We probably don't want feedback accumulating on Talk:About Beta Features.

Also when I read on About Beta Features "Can you help us test Beta Features in coming days?" I have some trouble guessing is it about some features du jour we are testing right now (Formulae, etc.) or is it about Extension:BetaFeatures as a little supporting tool?

For example right now I am much more concerned with getting the preferences page and translations right and much less about actual features to be deployed and tested.

« Saper // talk » 00:16, 2 November 2013 (UTC)

Name
Horrible, end-user-unfriendly name. We are scratching our head already how to translate it not to scare anybody with the IT slang. « Saper // talk » 23:30, 30 October 2013 (UTC)


 * What would be better name? Experimental features? I don't think that it's a unfriendly name, but translating maybe can be hard for some languages (e.g. if they don't have suitable word for beta). --Stryn (talk) 10:42, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * We have Gadgets, so may be Experiments ? « Saper // talk »  13:20, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Experiments was the original name, it was changed due to possible confusion with "Labs" which is a separate project.—
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 22:58, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Didn't know that, honest! Still much better name than the current one. I dislike the word "beta" going mainstream (I think it was Google's fault:). I had also some other ideas, like testing ground (or similar) that that should be easy to convey to other languages/cultures (Poligon in Polish for example). Are we soon going to run out of words to describe tinkering? I hope, not! « Saper // talk »  23:09, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

HTML
This is ugly (taken from my experimental deployment):

w3m for example does not really get it:



There is lots of classes and metadata but simple spaces between "information" and "discussion" are missing, not sure why we have  twice; lots of paragraphs which we don't want.

« Saper // talk » 23:29, 1 November 2013 (UTC)

Checkboxes
…were originally imagined to be on a white background (beta features wasn't in prefs at that point) so it wasn't explicitly called out that they should actually have a white fill in all states, without the white fill they don't really look like controls (hover state would probably help too)— Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 23:02, 1 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I did not like them as they are inconsitent with the rest of the interface. « Saper // talk »  23:29, 1 November 2013 (UTC)