HI @Pginer-WMF,
A couple of points:

• The wording of the description for Mark as read is odd. I was trying to think of an improvement but anything I thought of just made this more complicated. Which leads to my next point...
• Can we mix items with descriptions and items without? Or does the design require it?
• Re. Mute: Just want to be sure I understand: Is the long menu choice there just as an example of long-ness? I.e., I don't even know how that sentence is supposed to end--until when? I'm sure we could write it shorter, but assume you're just giving an example for design purposes?

Can we mix items with descriptions and items without? Or does the design require it?

My first option would be to provide a short text that helps to set the expectations. If we found out that is not possible to do so, it is better to skip it than confuse the users. In this case, an alternative message is to indicate that the changes can be reverted to encourage exploration (e.g., Mark as read You can undo this anytime )

Re. Mute: Just want to be sure I understand: Is the long menu choice there just as an example of long-ness?

Yes. I just went to the Notification Page prototype and edited the HTML to make the action artificially long.

This commit: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/267399/ should fix / display these descriptions. We seem to be missing the descriptions from the API, however? Or the description texts in actions in general.

Do we have a list of the descriptions we want to have, or should we create that list?

@Mooeypoo asks:

Do we have a list of the descriptions we want to have, or should we create that list?

@Pginer-WMF, do we have a breakdown of menu items and descriptions?

Currently we have:

• Secondary actions: Those are defined by the extensions. They may appear inside the "..." menu on certain conditions (e.g., when there are more than 3 items, or when the item appears inside a bundle). We don't have descriptions defined for them in the spreadsheet.
• General actions: Currently we are just providing mark as read/unread. Joe had some concerns about the descriptions proposed for such actions, so we don't have a final copy.

Given that additional clarifications may be needed as more complex actions (e.g., volume control) are supported, we can postpone this whole ticket until then.

Moving this to the Product/Design column

I reviewed all the secondary links to see what kinds of descriptions we'd write for them and have concluded that at present, we don't have a need for this feature. Looking through all the secondary actions, the vast majority are the following:

• A user name of an actor -- I hope this is self-evident (or we have done a disservice by rewriting the names out of all the messages)
• A page name -- the full pagename + namespace is available on hover
• "View changes" -- should be pretty self explanatory.
• "All links to this page" -- self explanatory.

There are a very few actions -- e.g., "Contest" or "Public Log" -- that might benefit, but they're fairly uncommon. And to disambiguate the link all a user has to do is click on it.

When we get into more complex functionality, like Mute, we may well need to add this type of guidance to the menus. (I've added this as a blocker to T115264, Volume Control.) But until then I think we can spare ourselves and the translating world this burden. I'm moving this to the backlog.