In today's grooming ritual, we wondered aloud whether the MinervaPageActions config is actually needed – it was but is it still?

The MinervaPageActions config variable isn't explicitly set in production (see https://codesearch.wmflabs.org/operations/?q=MinervaPageActions), which means all of the Wikimedia-hosted wikis are receiving the default treatment.

#### $wgMinervaPageActions

* Type: `Array`
* Default: `['edit', 'talk', 'watch', 'switch-language']`

I can't see any reason for this nowadays given these can all be configured by other means e.g. wgPermissions. This is adding unnecessary confusion to our code.

Note: We never alter the default value of $wgMinervaPageActions in configuration which suggests at the very least it should be removed.

The configuration flag previously allowed a site admin to make items disappear from the UI. For example, if I removed the "edit" item from wgMinervaPageActions the edit icon would disappear.

The feature was limited to the edit, talk, watch and switch language features. However, it does not allow the removal of the history link and talk page link. In the case of the talk page, the talk page link is hardcoded to only show on the main page for logged in users (see MinervaPagePermissions::isTalkAllowed) or at the top of the pages where MinervaTalkAtTop is set.

Only language, edit and watch can be removed with the existing configuration:

Without the configuration option I can remove language using the following code:

$wgHideInterlanguageLinks = true;

I can remove the watch star by using :

$wgGroupPermissions['user']['viewmywatchlist'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['editmywatchlist'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['viewmywatchlist'] = false;

This has the benefit of also removing the watch star on other skins such as Vector.

The edit icon cannot be removed without this configuration variable, however this is probably a good thing given editing is a fundamental need of a wiki. If an admin did want to hide the edit link they could always ship an inline style to do the BeforePageDisplay hook.

I thus propose we remove this configuration option and clean up the code.

Change 731842 had a related patch set uploaded (by Jdlrobson; author: Jdlrobson):

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] Drop wgMinervaPageActions

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/731842

Change 732377 had a related patch set uploaded (by Bernard Wang; author: Bernard Wang):

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] Remove MinervaTemplate::getSecondaryActions

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/732377

Change 731842 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/skins/MinervaNeue@master] Drop wgMinervaPageActions

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/731842

Test Result - Beta

Status: ✅ PASS
Environment: beta
OS: macOS Big Sur
Browser: Chrome
Device: MBP
Emulated Device: NA

Test Artifact(s):

QA Steps

For production use the same URLs e.g. en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org > en.m.wikipedia.org

Anonymous user:
✅ AC1: There should be no talk page at the bottom of https://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page

✅ AC4: There should be an edit and language button at the top of https://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein
See AC4

Logged in user (AMC enabled or AMC disabled)
✅ AC5: There should be a talk button at the bottom of https://en.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page