Change 810065 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; author: Esanders):

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Hide the lede section on mobile when DiscussionTools is enabled

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/810065

New Vector’s table of contents treats the lead section as a special section named Beginning. What about doing the same on talk pages with MobileFrontend (surprisingly it’s a MobileFrontend feature, not Minerva?), putting the lead in a collapsible section? With this done, I think the “About this page” thing can be disabled on talk pages, as it doesn’t really work with complex tmboxes (tmboxes are often much more complex than amboxes)—see for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_architecture#/issues/all (vs desktop version), the mobile version shows the metadata blob (which is incomprehensible for humans), but doesn’t show the portal link (which may be the most important thing for mobile users who also edit from desktop and use mobile mainly for reading).

In T311760#8042100, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

putting the lead in a collapsible section?

I think this is one of the possible options for part 2 in the description, although I haven't created a task for it yet. I'm not sure we would use a normal collapsible section, especially as we are re-styling those in the near future, but something you click on to reveal the lede section somewhere.

With this done, I think the “About this page” thing can be disabled on talk pages, as it doesn’t really work with complex tmboxes (tmboxes are often much more complex than amboxes)

I agree we should probably ditch that feature on talk pages once we have a solution to part 2.

Change 810065 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Hide the lede section on mobile when DiscussionTools is enabled

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/810065

This means that some of this content will not be discoverable on wikis where the page-issues feature doesn't work

After https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools/+/810113/1, the lede section becomes visible when "Read as wiki page" is clicked which maintains the status quo.

On https://simple.m.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Main_Page

Before patch	After patch	After "Read as wiki page"

I don't like this solution. I dislike hiding that content completely (I also dislike what MobileFrontend is doing with the "About this page" section), and I really really dislike that it is forcing us to keep the "Read as wiki page" button in our new design.

Change 811410 had a related patch set uploaded (by Esanders; author: Esanders):

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Hide the lede section on mobile when DiscussionTools is enabled (2nd attempt)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/811410

So the first patch applied this treatment to any page where the reply tool might be available. Unfortunately DiscussionTools is quite permissive and includes all namespaces in $wgExtraSignatureNamespaces, which can be a lot, for example on mediawiki.org it includes the main namespace, so this caused T312177.

What we were trying to do was provide a replacement for Minerva/MobileFrontend's simplified talk page view, which is only enabled in actual talk namespaces (see SkinMinerva::isSimplifiedTalkPageEnabled), so the 2nd attempt of this patch restricts the feature to pages with ns-talk.

In T311760#8042486, @Esanders wrote:

In T311760#8042100, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

putting the lead in a collapsible section?

I think this is one of the possible options for part 2 in the description, although I haven't created a task for it yet.

Here is a task for iterating upon the experience this task introduces: T312309

In T311760#8042486, @Esanders wrote:

In T311760#8042100, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

putting the lead in a collapsible section?

With this done, I think the “About this page” thing can be disabled on talk pages, as it doesn’t really work with complex tmboxes (tmboxes are often much more complex than amboxes)

I agree we should probably ditch that feature on talk pages once we have a solution to part 2.

+1; here is a task for deprecating the About this page feature: T312312.

In T311760#8042100, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

New Vector’s table of contents treats the lead section as a special section named Beginning. What about doing the same on talk pages with MobileFrontend (surprisingly it’s a MobileFrontend feature, not Minerva?), putting the lead in a collapsible section?

I've added the above to T312309 as a potential approach.

With this done, I think the “About this page” thing can be disabled on talk pages, as it doesn’t really work with complex tmboxes (tmboxes are often much more complex than amboxes)—see for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_architecture#/issues/all (vs desktop version), the mobile version shows the metadata blob (which is incomprehensible for humans), but doesn’t show the portal link (which may be the most important thing for mobile users who also edit from desktop and use mobile mainly for reading).

@Tacsipacsi, to be doubly clear, would it be accurate for me to understand the the issues you see with the current About this page experience as the following?

1. The mobile About this page experience arbitrarily excludes / hides content that is otherwise shown on desktop. E.g. notice how links to Portal:Architecture) and Portal:History do NOT appear in Talk:History_of_architecture#/issues/all.
2. The mobile About this page experience displays content in a way that is difficult for people to read. E.g. notice how dense the text is and the amount of text that is shown. [i]

i.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_architecture#/issues/all

Change 811410 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/DiscussionTools@master] Hide the lede section on mobile when DiscussionTools is enabled (2nd attempt)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/811410

In T311760#8058070, @ppelberg wrote:

In T311760#8042100, @Tacsipacsi wrote:

With this done, I think the “About this page” thing can be disabled on talk pages, as it doesn’t really work with complex tmboxes (tmboxes are often much more complex than amboxes)—see for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_architecture#/issues/all (vs desktop version), the mobile version shows the metadata blob (which is incomprehensible for humans), but doesn’t show the portal link (which may be the most important thing for mobile users who also edit from desktop and use mobile mainly for reading).

@Tacsipacsi, to be doubly clear, would it be accurate for me to understand the the issues you see with the current About this page experience as the following?

1. The mobile About this page experience arbitrarily excludes / hides content that is otherwise shown on desktop. E.g. notice how links to Portal:Architecture) and Portal:History do NOT appear in Talk:History_of_architecture#/issues/all.

Yes. And actually this is by far not the worst: for example, on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Archaeology#/issues/all in addition to the portal link, the Article milestones section is missing from the article history template, as well as the archive links from the archive template, without which it doesn’t make much sense…

2. The mobile About this page experience displays content in a way that is difficult for people to read. E.g. notice how dense the text is and the amount of text that is shown. [i]

No, I don’t think it’s unreadably dense. And it’s definitely not what I meant: what I meant is that the About this page experience arbitrarily displays content that is not aimed at humans and is accordingly hidden on desktop. E.g. notice that ArchitectureWikipedia:WikiProject ArchitectureTemplate:WikiProject ArchitectureArchitecture articles appears in the About this page view, even though it doesn’t appear on desktop (it’s hidden using TemplateStyles).