Hi all. I decided to take a bit of a step back on this one and try to get a more holistic view of the problem.

Firstly, I’ve looked at namespace variations and highlighted what I see as issues and inconsistencies:

Secondly, I’ve tried to breakdown the various parts of the namespace to try and get a better understanding of how they are constructed and what each element is communicating:

You’ll notice in the above image that there are two variations in how I’ve broken down the elements. I’d be keen to know if either of these options resonate more with people?

My thinking is if we can come to a common understanding of this then we can start to answer how we can approach the typographic styling across the various types of namespace.

@Jacqui.Clydesdale - can you take a look at these explorations from a grammar perspective? Specifically, I'm wondering about the spacing after the colon - can you confirm that is a best practice?

@iamjessklein In general, there's no space before a colon and one space after it (English rules only). Back in the print days, there were two spaces after, but we've eliminated that in the modern era (as with full stops). I have never seen the "no spaces before or after" recommendation.

Breakdown 1 is a lot more accurate. In breakdown 2, viewing the namespace part as a "label" feels like it carries incorrect implications to me -- the namespace is an important part of the page name not a separate thing. Particularly when you're dealing with namespaced pages that aren't in a talk namespace -- every talk/user_talk/project_talk/etc_talk page is implicitly paired with a non-talk page, and "Wikipedia:Something" isn't necessarily related in any way to "Something".

@KieranMcCann You might appreciate a quick historical note that the «XXX: Revision history» text been changed somewhat recently, in https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/core/+/742235. It was previously shown as «Revision history of "XXX"». You might find that it's still like this in some languages, if the translations haven't been updated.

This shows that there isn't really a meaningful distinction between (as you called them) the "action" and the "secondary page", it's just inconsistent because different people worked on different parts at different times, and came up with different solutions.

If we're hoping to make them consistent, we should probably aim to put the "actions" after the page title, since that seems to be the new style (and the rationale I remember is that the same text is shown in the browser tabs, and having the title up-front makes it easier to find the right tab when you have many of them open).

Based on the additional complexity of the namespace and the potential for issues relating to system font heights, on reflection I think it might be best to drop the styling of the ‘Talk:’ element of the namespace and leave it as it is.

But I would still argue for the addition of the space after the colon, with the condition that the space not included if a user copies the text into their clipboard to avoid any issues with copying and pasting to search.

In T307727#7983634, @KieranMcCann wrote:

Based on the additional complexity of the namespace and the potential for issues relating to system font heights, on reflection I think it might be best to drop the styling of the ‘Talk:’ element of the namespace and leave it as it is.

Understood; I'm fine with us dropping the change in page title treatment for now.

But I would still argue for the addition of the space after the colon, with the condition that the space not included if a user copies the text into their clipboard to avoid any issues with copying and pasting to search.

Sounds good, @KieranMcCann.

I've created T313636 to implement a space between the namespace (Talk:) and the page title