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Usability: Difficulty Discovering the functions feature in Wikipedia
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Description

Difficulty Discovering the functions feature in Wikipedia
Participants struggled to locate the functions feature on Wikipedia. Many did not instinctively look in the "Insert" menu, where it is currently located (hidden behind a "See more" option). Instead, they explored other areas like "Tools," or expected a more prominent, dedicated button on the visual editor toolbar.

Recommendations
Goal: Improve the discoverability of the Wikifunctions feature in Wikipedia so that editors can easily and quickly find how to access and add functions to an article.

Ideas:

  • Elevate "Functions" to a top-level item in the "Insert" menu
  • Consider adding a dedicated "Functions" button or icon directly to the main editor toolbar
  • Automatically prompt editors to add relevant functions when they add content that would benefit from a function. We don't need an ML model for this at least for a start. Since we have a few useful functions for articles, we can just hardcode certain key words per function so when the editor enters such it triggers the Function recommendation. For example if an editor enters an age or date or the word 'born' we can prompt them to use the Age function.
  • Create more awareness about the functions feature in the community

Event Timeline

gonyeahialam triaged this task as High priority.
gonyeahialam updated the task description. (Show Details)
gonyeahialam removed subscribers: Jdforrester-WMF, Aklapper.

The potential improvement in discoverability of wikifunctions was mentioned in T391734: [QA task] testwiki - wikifunctions integration testing

  • a keyboard shortcut
  • a back nav button in the wikifunciton dialog, so a user can easily change their wikifunction selection without dismissing the wikifucntion dialog instead of going to the Insert menu again and scrolling to the end of the menu for selecting wikifunction insert option

(2) No back button on the insert wikifunction overlay?

Figma designtestwiki wmf.25
Screen Shot 2025-04-11 at 5.38.57 PM.png (1×1 px, 138 KB)
Screen Shot 2025-04-11 at 5.38.57 PM.png (1×1 px, 138 KB)
  • a user cannot return to the Search for wikifunctions overlay
  • dismissing (clicking on x) will close the overlay and a user needs to click on the Insert menu and click on the Function menu item to start inserting a new wikifunction.
  • no shortcuts for inserting wikifunctions (cmd+? for VE shortcuts)
gonyeahialam lowered the priority of this task from High to Low.Jul 9 2025, 1:54 PM
gonyeahialam raised the priority of this task from Low to Medium.Tue, Oct 14, 1:27 PM