Talk:Beta Features/Archive

Please share your feedback about Beta Features.

Nice
Letters are quite clear and that's really good, and the picture feature rocks--Kalogeropoulos (talk) 10:37, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Good balance of new and old
It is necessary to keep and save the traditional functions to compact with the habit of the old users.117.35.130.95 05:29, 24 November 2013 (UTC) https://plus.google.com/u/0/110204104909078224352/posts fixes the problem in Opera 12. Solid colors make the background disappear. Same for every non-null radius. A very simple solution would be to remove the border completely and embed it into the background image. It's a fixed width and height image anyway. Using the sprite technique you can avoid having two images. --TMg 14:02, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
 * PS: The problem immediately disappears when switching to a PNG. Simply upload the file to Commons and edit-protect the page. (I'm using an other file in my example.) Using an double size image solves the problem on high-res (retina) screens. This works perfectly in Opera 12 and all other browsers. Except for IE8 which is not a new problem since it can't render SVG and was not supported anyway. Should I open a Bugzilla report for this or is this enough to wake up the developers? --TMg 19:11, 22 January 2014 (UTC)
 * PPS: An additional white background (the preferences are using a slightly gray background) makes it more obvious this is a clickable UI element. I think this fits very well in the "flat" style. --TMg 19:36, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Thumbnails
I wanted to test the "VisualEditor formulae editing" feature but couldn't tell from preferences page what it does. I think this can be fixed by changing the description (remove the "remember" stuff and describe what it does instead) and the image ([//bits.wikimedia.org/static-1.23wmf2/extensions/VisualEditor/betafeatures-icon-VisualEditor-formulae.svg this one]). I suggest to make the image more realistic. The Σ bigger and darker and a popup like the one that opens when using the Σ in the editor. --TMg 12:18, 6 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks, TMg, you make a good point that better descriptions and more realistic thumbnails would make it easier for people to understand what each feature does. I am passing on your recommendation to our design and development teams. Much appreciated. Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 03:09, 12 November 2013 (UTC)


 * TMg, since many of the beta features will be more about behaviors that look & feel changes, I don't know that realistic screenshots will be particularly useful, especially shrunk down to such a small size. Your point about clarity in writing for beta feature description, we're trying to be brief, clear about what changes, and write in a language that is understandable by all users, not just highly technical ones.
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 11:09, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Jaredzimmerman, I think this is quite simple: Either the images are supposed to be screenshots or not. Either make them recognizable or don't make them look like screenshots. About what you call "technical": The current description is neither "brief" nor "clear about what changes":
 * Add experimental support [...] Superfluous information. Everything in the Beta tab is experimental.
 * to VisualEditor for creating and editing of mathematical formulae [...] I expected a "Visual formulae editor" like the Equation Editor in Word.
 * for testing, ahead of general release. [...] Again, superfluous. This is a description of what the Beta features are, not a description of the "formulae" feature.
 * Please remember to always review your changes before saving when using experimental features." This applies to everything you do with the Visual Editor. It's not specific for the "formulae" feature and does not help to understand what it is, what it does and how it works.
 * --TMg 16:28, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * TMg I didn't write the copy for the VE formula beta features but I'm happy to work with the team who did to clarify, The last point really is VE specific as most of the other Beta Features don't edit content. To your point about the icons, they are just that icons, they are symbolic representations of the feature, they aren't trying to show exactly what changes but give users an idea of what to look for when the feature is enabled. We really do appreciate your feedback on both the icons and the body copy for the beta features, And I'll work with the teams to get it to a place where it is clear and concise.
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 09:38, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * As I said that's what I expected: give an idea of what to look for. The icon suggests there is a Σ in the toolbar but it is not. You have to click "More" and look for something entitled "LaTeX". If you click it, nothing happens. I still find this very confusing. At least use the same name everywhere. Either use "LaTeX" or "formulae" everywhere. Don't mix it. --TMg 11:27, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

In the beta features tab the thumbnails are low contrast. There is light grey text on light grey background. This is counter-intuitive; the big fat icons don't help to distinguish the entries they are for. Smaller (64x64) icons, were they properly coloured, would have been more helpful. --Gryllida 03:48, 25 November 2013 (UTC)

Enable all features
I was confused by the first tickbox, "Automatically enable all new beta features". I didn't read that properly and simply assumed that, being at the top, it allowed one-click activation of all the available features. Provide another option for this? Thanks. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:54, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I wasn't confused by this, but may be it should be called "subscribe to ... " or something like this? In a translation I am working on I say "I would like to participate in new experiments; enable new features as soon as they get installed." (rough translation). « Saper // talk »  14:01, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I was confused about this as well, I think it should be clarified TheDJ (talk) 09:38, 5 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Same here. I don't think it should be clarified though -- it should just be what people intuit it to be. That is, enable all beta features, and automatically enable all future beta features. equazcion � 08:58, 8 Nov 2013 (UTC)
 * +1 to Equazcion's suggested solution. –Quiddity (talk) 21:49, 9 November 2013 (UTC)
 * +1. I was confused too. Helder 14:12, 8 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Dear Elitre, TheDJ, Equazcion, Quiddity, Helder and Saper: Thanks for pointing out this confusing feature and suggesting possible solutions! I also find this feature confusing, as I would expect it to enable all the current features right away, not just future ones -- for the reasons you mention above. My recommendation to the development team is to change both the functionality and the wording to say something like 'Automatically enable all current and new beta features'. This would match user expectations more closely than the current solution. It's a pleasure to be working with you all to improve this tool together :) Fabrice Florin (WMF) (talk) 03:09, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

A few questions

 * 1) Will the Beta word get highlighted, or will a number appear nearby, to let users know when there are new features they might want to test?
 * 2) Can the interface in each project please specify that other projects might have more features to test, and which ones, if not all the projects are getting all the features? Thanks! --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 15:05, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Hi, Elitre (WMF) There is no plan for there to be a highlight or a number count on the Beta link right now, but the roadmap does talk about some ideas for alerting users as to when new features are available, such as popups (guided tour framework) and/or echo notifications
 * Not totally sure what you mean? all beta features will be available on all projects as long as they are relevant (e.g. if a site doesn't have any location based information associated with articles like wiktionary, the nearby feature won't be on that wiki) Beta Features are on mediawiki.org right now for testing purposes prior to being rolled out to all wikis.
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 09:48, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks Jared, your example fits my question. If I primarily edit Wiktionary, I might still want to know that other wikis have Nearby as a feature (it's cool!) and might want to go elsewhere to try it. One of the reasons why I think BF is going to be awesome is that it will raise consciousness of how many features, tools and software are being built by WMF among all the communities because that work might be hardly seen. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 09:58, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * At the moment there is no "master list" of beta features that is shown irrespective of the site you are on, but its an interesting request. I'm a little hesitant to list features you can't use on a specific project with the disclaimer you can "go to another project" to try them out but we'll think about a way to do it that makes sense, suggestions welcome.
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 10:02, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Along with text that carefully explains what's going on, we might actually provide a direct link to that other wiki where one can test the feature (so you might decide whether you'd like to have the user redirected to mw.org or anywhere else). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:08, 20 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Interesting Elitre (WMF), but the problem is that now we're showing disabled features on some wikis, which feels a little annoying to users for me.
 * Jaredzimmerman (WMF) (talk) 11:16, 20 November 2013 (UTC)


 * FWIW, Nearby is enabled on sv-wikt. I was quite confused by it, since we don't have any location info... Skalman (talk) 17:26, 22 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Another question: When are updates to the beta functions pushed to the wikis? On the Talk pages to the features there are bug reports answered with "is already fixed in the code". Yeah, super, nice, but this doesn't solve the bug on my language.wikipedia.org. --2003:63:2F00:D800:1425:4F00:BFE7:16A6 08:45, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Link in personal tools
Do we really need that ? It's getting a bit busy up there and hitting the right link after initial page load can be like a game of whack a mole, with many of them being loaded after the initial DOM. TheDJ (talk) 07:10, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Isn't the "Beta" link at the top only a test here at the MediaWiki wiki? It doesn't make sense to have two identical links to the preferences. I really hope this is a misunderstanding and such a developers feature will not be deployed to all Wikimedia wikis. --TMg 10:14, 12 November 2013 (UTC)


 * 2 Notes.
 * See an identical discussion at m:Meta:Babel.
 * See also the related Beta Features proposal for a Compact Personal Bar.
 * HTH. –Quiddity (talk) 23:40, 17 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Another related discussion is which I've filed ages ago. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by  Matma Rex (talk • contribs) 17:56, 24 November 2013‎ (UTC)

Żadna w nowych funkcji nie spełnia oczekiwań.
Wypróbowałem nowe funkcje: Przeglądarka multimedów, Typography refresh, Near this page i Edycja wzorów matematycznych za pomocą VisualEditora. Zadna z nich, według mnie nie nadaje się do uzycia. Poza tym cały opis jest w obcym jezyku. Radek68 (dyskusja)  16:33, 25 December 2013 (UTC)


 * [en] Sorry that you did not like each of these Beta Features. If you have feedback about them, it would be hugely helpful if you could give it to those projects on their pages. When you say "nie nadaje się do uzycia" do you mean you don't think these are interesting, or not high quality enough, or something else?
 * [pl] Przykro mi, że nie lubisz każdej z tych funkcji Beta. Jeśli masz opinię na ich temat, byłoby to niezwykle pomocne, jeśli możesz dać go do tych projektów na swoich stronach. Kiedy mówisz "nie nadaje sie do uzycia" to znaczy, że nie sądzę, to ciekawe, czy zbyt niska jakość, czy coś innego?
 * Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 06:04, 10 January 2014 (UTC)

Access for anonymous users
Has been considered to expose beta features to anonymous users? Even if the settings are are only remembered for the session (and we encourage the users to create an account) it would be useful to make them easier to access to our readers. Having an URL pointing to a specific feature would also help to ask our community to try some experimental features with a very low entry barrier. Pginer (talk) 18:13, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Mechanism to mark a feature as depending on another
Beta Features might need to have a mechanism to describe a feature as depending on another. The VisualEditor Formula feature, for example, depends on the VisualEditor feature being enabled on wikis where it is opt-in. One solution is to prevent the user from enabling a feature before all the features it depends on are enabled, and another is to automatically enable the features required, with or without notifying the user that the other features have been enabled. Yet another is to put the features that depend on a feature under the feature they depend on and to indent them to show this. -- Rastus Vernon (talk) 21:57, 2 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Rastus, on Test wiki I do see a red warning in my Preferences, "This feature requires the following feature to be enabled: VisualEditor". Do you think this is not enough? Thanks, --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:45, 4 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Aaand... it's gone (I can't see it anymore today). --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:25, 5 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)
 * For the matter of the labels, we have one that's the "styled" checkbox (so it makes sense why you wouldn't see that), and the other which is the existing text label. Both are fairly necessary, unless you can think of a better way to do this...I guess if we're assuming JavaScript for the styled checkboxes anyway, we could add the chrome around them in JS itself, but I didn't see much need for that. I could revisit that decision fairly easily. --MarkTraceur (talk) 01:13, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

"Automatically enable all new beta features" not working (?)
This is not related to the fact that it does not do what people expect. At the start of the month, I enabled the then-available features (I think) and clicked the "Automatically enable all new beta features" checkbox. A few days ago, after a few new features were added (I think), and after checking the beta features page and adding them, I realized that they were not automatically added. Unfortunately, this is hard to test and reproduce due to the scarcity of new beta features. Fixefox, Windows 7:Jay8g (talk) 04:15, 24 November 2013 (UTC)
 * I expected "enable all new beta features" to enable the already existing features, not just ones introduced in the future. But that doesn't seem to be how it works - is that intended? a bug? Not clear. (If intended, I'd argue that's a design flaw - anyone bold enough to opt into unknown future features almost certainly also wants to opt into the known set of features, no?) -LVilla (WMF) (talk) 00:55, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
 * That is true, and has been discussed before. However, it seems to not be working at all, even the way it was designed for (automatically enable later features). Jay8g (talk) 01:39, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Have there actually been any new BetaFeatures released, since the initial set was released? Afaik, the 5 existing items were all available on the first day. Ahh, nope, WMF Blog post says that "Nearby Pages" wasn't part of the initial release. Filed as 60748. Hopefully that's an accurate description of the problem - I don't remember precisely enough to be sure. –Quiddity (talk) 20:04, 2 February 2014 (UTC)


 * It seem "Automatically enable all new beta features" doesn't work!--Emara (talk) 13:13, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Mark
In Spanish Wikipedia's preferences, cannot mark the beta features, to use them.--Diamondland (talk) 08:35, 10 January 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you use Opera? See above. --TMg 15:13, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

Bug: Wikipedia pages aren't using 100% available width
After enabling all the beta features, the page width seems to be limited at about 1000px.

This is what I see: http://i.imgur.com/59YlvBI.png

It happens in all Wikipedia pages and with any browser, as soon as I log in. --The nuts (talk) 01:14, 28 January 2014 (UTC)
 * The fixed width is part of the current Typography refresh test iteration. There is a lot of feedback on that aspect of the current test-design, at the talkpage for that feature. HTH. –Quiddity (talk) 19:39, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Cannot edit
I tried it for a while, and it worked fine, but then suddenly I tried to edit and it won't come up, though I am not sure if it is a issue or just a simple Internet connection issue. Andrei Marzan (talk) 16:12, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Which of the Beta Features are you referring to? This is the talkpage for the entire Beta Features meta-feature. You can see the list of currently available items, at About Beta Features, in order to find the appropriate talkpage to submit your bug. Thanks! –Quiddity (talk) 19:36, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Table Controls
I would like to see functionality to add columns and rows to tables. Timboliu (talk) 08:17, 8 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Hey Timboliu, are you perhaps suggesting that this feature is made available in VisualEditor? In this case, this is a common request - and you can follow updates via this tracking bug. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 10:46, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Crosspost list from German Wikipedia
At de:Wikipedia:Umfragen/Technische Wünsche the German community is currently preparing a giant list of "Beta features" they "would like to see". A few currently top voted features are: --TMg 10:40, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Cross-wiki watchlist.
 * Search in the category tree, in old versions, in logfiles and histories, search for colors in images and much more.
 * Preview of  while editing sections (5984).
 * Real possibility to move files to Commons.
 * Less JavaScript bulk users don't really need.

suggestions based on Tamil Version
I would like to bring these suggestions to your attention based on my experience based on Tamil wikipedia. More over these are generic suggestions. --Neechalkaran (talk) 01:10, 22 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Dead links should remain in same color(red). If found dead interlinks are visible in blue color
 * Need transliteration features for non english versions

Thank You, no
I am satisfied with everything in the existing functions. Why you need to clutter up the editing of the new, purely ornamental, functions? Lesless (talk) 08:26, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Some (typography) seem to be harmless, others ("media viewer") are not just irritating, they are ... insurmountable? You've added an extra screen in between wikipedia and commons (instead of one click), and the "take me where I wanted to" "button" is set in five-pixel typeface. Screen loupe and batteries not included. Brilliant. I suppose that when this thing goes live and mandatory, the only way to navigate between wikipedia and commons will be cut-and-pasting filenames. Retired electrician (talk) 10:03, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

After testing "typography" and "Media viewer" I agree with the colleagues above. New typefaces do not make the text look any better than before, the media viewer prevents me from going directly to the commons, where I typically want to read the original description of the file and/or the licence. Gżdacz (talk) 19:21, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Gżdacz, this and several next sections. Thanks. Gryllida 02:57, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

New gallery support by default
A while ago, new gallery support was introduced, but only when specifically added to a page. As a step on the way to possibly making a new mode (probably "packed") the default, it could be made default as a beta feature. (It could also be changed through a standard preference.) Jay8g (talk) 00:25, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Selecting namespaces for beta features...
Option to activate the beta features selectively, on some namespaces, would be nice (Specifically I'd like to try VE at talk pages at my own risk for example).

Gryllida 03:21, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

Skin support...
Dear wonderful people, you had disabled skins a few months back to easier support the new tools. Can you please do so on all of the very small amount of remaining skins? Thanks.

Gryllida 04:32, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think that idea is workable, here. Beta Features are meant to introduce new features, not to assist with removing old features.
 * Note: The disabled skins were discussed/decided at Turning off outdated skins (see Turning off outdated skins/stats in particular). There are a significant number of active power-users who use the remaining 3 non-default skins. –Quiddity (talk) 20:20, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

MathJax
Why does MathJax show something in the left bottom for good 5-10 seconds to render math, while StackExchange Math (this question for example) also renders math (differently from PNG, it's all text) but I don't wait at all? And can we please move MathJax into the Beta tab? Gryllida 00:47, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Icon disappears after visiting "View history"
The icon of this function does not show up again after visiting "View history" and coming back to the article itself. I observed this anomalous behaviour in Chrome under Win7 (in Opera it works correctly). Tested on plwiki. Gżdacz (talk) 16:10, 5 February 2014 (UTC)