This could be a solution or part of a solution to the edge case of a user wanting to return to the entire article after editing a section T209984#5005124

Hey @iamjessklein we need your input on this, @DLynch said this would be easy to implement but we just need to figure out how we'd like to. @matmarex is also linking https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T210659 as it relates to this work.

The same idea is mentioned as a part of T210659:

• Edit
  • Clicking edit will open the editing for the entire article

So, Reading team might be working on it? I hope :)

We are going to work on this in the near future

Bumping this ticket as it came up several times at Wikimania Stockholm usability testing.

In Minerva without AMC, you could add a button at the end of the page alongside "Discussion". But this might be too prominent. Could we put it beside the button(s) but make it a smaller link rather than a big button? (Similar to the Cancel link on the right of the Publish | Preview | Changes buttons in desktop wikitext editor, but not bold nor red.)

For Minerva with AMC, "edit whole page" could go in the overflow (vertical ellipsis) menu. T234659

I note that placement of the top pencil icon in AMC was designed to be a full-page edit T210659. But whole-page editing was seen as a problem for VE on mobile T227897. Placement of the top-section edit pencil for both AMC and non-AMC really should be reconsidered T228107 sooner rather than later. Now that its function has changed, its location is confusing.

In T178159#5547735, @Pelagic wrote:

At time of writing this, there is no longer any edit page button on mobile. And the section-name part of the edit summary is not just enforced, but is invisible. If I want to add a section, I have to switch to desktop view or leave an incorrect edit summary.

EDIT: I just did a test. On mobile wikitext editor, the section name that gets inserted is not the one I clicked on, but the first heading in the saved text.

I've been wanting to suggest this for years as the events that lead to my global lock began because of an issue of not knowing how to do this on mobile, my suggestion for this would be that if you're on mobile the pencil ✏️ now has "a small triangle" and if you click on it it would ask "Edit lead - Edit full page", this way mobile users would have the ability to edit what. For large pages this won't cause an issue if a mobile user only wants to edit the top of the page. I still can't believe that the WMF is finally adopting this idea, it just seems so surreal.

But it needs to be properly implemented as it shouldn't be the default as for desktop users, especially since large pages can crash mobile devices more easily.

Note that modern mobile devices are probably powerful enough to load large pages, but many users from developing countries probably have cheaper mobile telephones, which is why this feature would probably be better if "the top pencil ✏️" gives a user a choice rather than assuming their choice.

Change 776236 had a related patch set uploaded (by DLynch; author: DLynch):

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] Add "edit full page" to the minerva overflow menu

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/776236

In the interest of nudging this along: that patch adds a "edit full page" button to the overflow menu. I.e. it's only visible to users with Advanced Mobile Contributions turned on.

(I haven't been incredibly thorough on the patch and looking for edge cases; I wanted something that worked for discussion more than I wanted an immediately-mergable thing.)

Test wiki created on Patch demo by ESanders (WMF) using patch(es) linked to this task:
https://patchdemo.wmflabs.org/wikis/880dd85371/w/

https://patchdemo.wmflabs.org/wikis/880dd85371/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Douglas+Adams&mobileaction=toggle_view_mobile

Does this need input from the web team?

When you click edit on mobile and click it again it shows up in the menu to change to the visible editor if you're using source code (this is what I have). Why not add another menu item there "Edit whole article", the same feature would be useful while editing the section.

I updated the patch because Ed pointed out that the link-takeover wasn't working. Now it does.

Video demonstration: https://youtube.com/shorts/hZa-Ame6o3w

Sure, moving the page around causes an "add topic" thing to appear at the bottom. But that's only momentarily if they scroll the page.

So maybe this pencil should be an alias for "add topic."

On the talk page maybe it's a good idea, but the issue is with normal articles. You don't want to add a topic to the article on Wikipedia.

Change 900695 had a related patch set uploaded (by DLynch; author: DLynch):

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] Make the action bar edit button edit the whole page

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/900695

The alternative, of course, being this patch: just have the top edit button edit the whole page. As was said, this is probably much more reasonable from a performance standpoint than back in 2017-or-so when the original decision was made.

As someone who often edits lead sections on mobile (e.g. moving paragraphs around infoboxes) given they are more important on mobile screens:
I'm not sure if this would be a bad thing, but one worry I would have is that sometimes I find it useful to be able to get to the bottom of the lead section to know where a long infobox or table ends and that would be lost if we switched to editing the whole page. I think this is more of a problem in the wikitext mode.

One thing to consider to alleviate that is perhaps the editor itself could allow switching between lead section and full editing mode either via an intermediate screen / dropdown / footer so this is at least accessible?