Hi all,
We're pleased to announce Beta Features [1], a new program that lets you test new features on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites before they are released for everyone.
Think of it as a digital laboratory where community members can preview upcoming software and give feedback to help improve them. This special preference page lets designers and engineers experiment with new features on a broad scale, but not in a disruptive manner.
Beta Features is ready for testing now on MediaWiki.org [2]. This Thursday, we plan to also deploy it on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki. After careful testing, we aim to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.
Here are the first features you can test this week: * Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen [3] * VisualEditor Formulæ — edit algebra or equations on your pages [4] * Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday) [5]
Would you like to try out BetaFeatures now? After you log in on MediaWiki.org, a small 'Beta' link will appear next to your 'Preferences'. Click on it to see features you can test, check the ones you want, then click 'Save'. Learn more on the BetaFeatures page. [1]
After you've tested Beta Features, please let us know what you think on our discussion page [6] -- or report any bugs on Bugzilla [7]. For technical documentation, visit the BetaFeatures extension page. [8]. You're also welcome to join our IRC office hours chat on Friday, 8 November at 10:30am PST, 18:30 UTC. [9]
Beta Features was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation's Design, Multimedia and VisualEditor teams. Along with other developers, we will be adding new features to this experimental program every few weeks.
For now, we'd like to thank some key team members who made this project possible: Ed Sanders, Jon Robson, Gergő Tisza, May Galloway, Vibha Bamba, Aaron Schulz, Brion Vibber, Bryan Davis, Chris Steipp, Greg Grossmeier, Keegan Peterzell, Quim Gil, Guillaume Paumier, Erik Moeller, Rob Lanphier, Howie Fung and Tomasz Finc, to name but a few. We're also very grateful to all the community and other team members who helped create this system — and look forward to many more productive collaborations in the future. :)
Enjoy, and don't forget to let us know what you think!
Fabrice, James, Mark and Jared Wikimedia Engineering and Product Group
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/About_Beta_Features [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-betafeatur... [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Multimedia/About_Media_Viewer [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Beta_Features/Formulae [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_Update [6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:About_Beta_Features [7] http://wmbug.com/new?product=MediaWiki%20extensions&component=BetaFeatur... [8] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BetaFeatures [9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IRC_office_hours#Upcoming_office_hours
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Fabrice Florin Product Manager, Multimedia Wikimedia Foundation
On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 2:32 PM, Fabrice Florin fflorin@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Beta Features is ready for testing now on MediaWiki.org [2]. This Thursday , we plan to also deploy it on Wikimedia Commons and MetaWiki. After careful testing, we aim to release it on all wikis worldwide on 21 November, 2013.
Here are the first features you can test this week:
- Media Viewer — view images in large size or full screen [3]
- VisualEditor Formulæ — edit algebra or equations on your pages [4]
- Typography Refresh — make text more readable (coming Thursday) [5]
Congrats on the release Fabrice, Mark, Jared, and everyone. I think this is a huge step forward.
One question: do we plan to actually add the "Beta" personal toolbar item perpetually for all users? I was unaware this was a part of the planned feature set.
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
ongrats on the release Fabrice, Mark, Jared, and everyone. I think this is a huge step forward.
One question: do we plan to actually add the "Beta" personal toolbar item perpetually for all users? I was unaware this was a part of the planned feature set.
Bump.
Was this addressed during the Office Hours?
I'm not sure whether this was discussed in the Office Hours.
For now, it's a perpetual link. But I don't think that makes much sense long term. I think the goals should be to inform the user when are beta features to try while minimizing nav clutter. Fabrice has documented some ideas along these lines (e.g., only showing beta link when there are new features, Echo notifications): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features#Future_Releases
Howie
On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Steven Walling swalling@wikimedia.orgwrote:
ongrats on the release Fabrice, Mark, Jared, and everyone. I think this is a huge step forward.
One question: do we plan to actually add the "Beta" personal toolbaritem perpetually for all users? I was unaware this was a part of the planned feature set.
Bump.
Was this addressed during the Office Hours?
-- Steven Walling, Product Manager https://wikimediafoundation.org/
EE mailing list EE@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee
On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 2:19 PM, Howie Fung hfung@wikimedia.org wrote:
For now, it's a perpetual link. But I don't think that makes much sense long term. I think the goals should be to inform the user when are beta features to try while minimizing nav clutter. Fabrice has documented some ideas along these lines (e.g., only showing beta link when there are new features, Echo notifications): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Beta_Features#Future_Releases
To be honest, I think this is a big issue with Beta Features, for the following reasons:
1. It's already quite a cluttered menu, especially on flagship projects like enwiki and Commons, which add their own extras to the menu via JS (Sandbox and My uploads respectively). 2. This is a very high value area with a lot of eyeballs, so changing or adding to it is something our users will have very vocal opinions about it. 3. All items in the personal toolbar are designed to be used very frequently, e.g. on a daily or weekly basis. BetaFeatures is not going to be used that frequently, unless we start adding to it every single week. We want people to see it, but it's significantly lower priority than ever other tool in there, IMO. 4. The pattern I am used to with beta or opt-in features is to see them in Preferences. Mobile does it this way, and so do other products like Gmail. We know Preferences is cluttered too, but this gives us extra reason to work on cleaning it up. 5. We have easy tools for driving people to Preferences sections, like guided tours and notifications. To my knowledge, we're already using or planning to use notifications to alert people about new beta features. If there is a visibility problem, we can use one or both of these new tools. 6. If we have Beta there in the toolbar temporarily but remove it later, then we're teaching people to look somewhere and then changing it later arbitrarily. This exacts a cost on our users to relearn something. That's bad. 7. We constantly have to fight the urge for everyone to add to three spaces: personal toolbar, left sidebar, and top tabs. Every time we add stuff there, our ability to claim we're interested in simplification wanes.
All in all, I think these reasons suggest we have to be very clear that we think BetaFeatures is important enough that it merits longterm placement in the personal toolbar. From what I've heard, it doesn't sound like we really do want it there, but we're doing so far lack of better ideas.
As I hint at in my comments, I think the right way to approach this is to put something as a tab in Preferences and be noisy about driving all users to it with notifications and guided tours.