It's an easy thing to fix if there's a policy about how it should work.

It works as it does now because back in 2014 @Eloquence requested the beta feature to be completely invisible to people who didn't enable it, saying that all beta features should be like that. Reality is more complicated than that, however, and I'm open to change.

@matmarex's suggestion sounds sensible to me, but I'd love to hear the opinions of @Jdforrester-WMF and @Pginer-WMF.

I'd be OK with a page saying "This page is unavailable unless you opt-in to the Beta Feature" or something similar, but I'm not sure how much work it'd be.

I'm totally supporting this idea.

• It would provide an easy link to share for people to try the tool in our communications. Currently we have to direct people to the "try the tool" section of the project page, where users have to follow instructions.
• It would alleviate the issues of beta features affecting a single wiki. A user enabling the beta feature in Japanese may navigate to Korean Wikipedia and not find obvious why the page is not there.

I'd also recommend not to present it as an error (i.e., with the negative connotation that the user did something wrong), but as an invitation to enable the beta feature. If this is considered for upcoming sprints, I'll be happy to provide some designs about this.

@Jdforrester-WMF, @Pginer-WMF, thanks for the comments. We're more or less in sync then, and we'll add it to one of the upcoming sprints.

In T125306#1985529, @Jdforrester-WMF wrote:

I'd be OK with a page saying "This page is unavailable unless you opt-in to the Beta Feature" or something similar, but I'm not sure how much work it'd be.

From a quick look, it's mostly going to be the work in writing the text. ContentTranslation seems to already check this by itself (what we're seeing now isn't the real error message indicating the special page doesn't exist, it's a fake one generated by ContentTranslation that mimics the real one very well). So very little programming, more copywriting. :)

This line in SpecialContentTranslation.php:

$out->showErrorPage( 'nosuchspecialpage', 'nospecialpagetext' );

Change 269403 had a related patch set uploaded (by Santhosh):
Provide one click beta feature activation from Special:CX

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/269403

Change 269403 merged by jenkins-bot:
Provide one click beta feature activation from Special:CX

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/269403

Change 269416 had a related patch set uploaded (by KartikMistry):
CX: Enable specialcx campaign

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/269416

Verified in http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org .

Change 269416 merged by jenkins-bot:
CX: Enable specialcx campaign

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/269416

A couple of considerations:

• For logged-out users we may want to point them to the log-in form with the appropriate "returnto" parameter. Otherwise, they have to make an additional manual step.
• In the current version there are three links at a similar level of prominence. The option to enable the tool should be the first and most prominent option.
• It would be good to mention that it is a beta tool to set expectations.

I represented the above ideas in a mockup below:

In T125306#2026452, @Amire80 wrote:

Verified in production.

In T125306#2018393, @Pginer-WMF wrote:

A couple of considerations:

• For logged-out users we may want to point them to the log-in form with the appropriate "returnto" parameter. Otherwise, they have to make an additional manual step.

As far as I tested, this already works in a sensible way. Clicking the "try" link takes the user to the log-in form and after typing the password correctly, the user is taken to Special:CX with the beta feature auto-enabled.

This is what I get after clicking the "try" link:

This is what I'd expect: