//⚠️ This Epic is in draft mode.//
This epic represents the work of making talk pages easier to understand.
Where "easier to understand" encompasses the following:
- **Activity:** make it easier for people to identify and understand new activity on a talk page (e.g. new comments since "you" last visited).
- **Actions:** make it easier for people to identify and understand the core actions on talk pages (e.g. starting new conversations, replying in existing ones, receiving updates about conversations that are relevant to you).
- **Content:** Making it easier for people to understand what is being talked about on talk pages. We think making the following elements easier for people to identify/distinguish will contribute to this "understanding":
-- Comments
-- Authors of comments
-- The relationships between comments
-- Conversations
=== Reported issues
//In the future, the issues below will likely become individual tasks. For now, we will gather all issues here.//
**It can be difficult to understand how comments relate to one another.**
- As @samat puts it, //"...on community discussion pages one section can be several pages long, and if somebody answers to the first person, their answer will be sooo far, that nobody can find out that it is an answer for the first person."// [1]
- As @Wladek92 describes this issue, //"If too many blocks are embedded we do not recognise to which subject the answer was addressed to (again show/hide mechanism would be welcomed).// Source: https://w.wiki/SjF.
**It can be difficult to distinguish comments from others.**
- As @Samat describes this issue, //"For longer or formatted comments it is not easy to see where is the end of one comment and where the next one starts.// [2]
**On mobile [3], there is currently tension between seeing the range of topics being discussed and the extent to which people are engaging with those topics.**
- @Parkywiki describing why they prefer the desktop view on mobile, //"...desktop lets me 'see' the whole of a talk page at once. It gives me an overview, allowing me to determine at a glance, not only the topics, but also the number and depth of replies a user has received. Whilst mobile view gives me a nice tidy page and big text to look at, it gives me absolutely no idea of whether any given topic has been answered by anyone."// [4]
-- This is particularly problematic when seeking to help newcomers:
--- At en.wiki's Teahouse, //"seeing if anyone else has replied is really important. Uncollapsing one topic at a time at the Teahouse would be a bit of a pain, and automatically having all threads uncollapsed would make the entire page too unwieldy to navigate through."// [4]
-- When posting on their user talk pages, //"...when I go to a new user page to leave a comment or warning, it's helpful to asses at a glance if someone else has already raised the same issue without having to expand anything."// [4]
**On mobile [3], getting a sense for all of the topics can require a lot of scrolling**
- @Parkywiki describes this here, //"The collapsed topics are very widely spaced, meaning I sometimes have to swipe down quite a lot just to see all the topic headers."// [4]
- And if you decide to expand a particular thread that has a lot of replies (e.g. [Talk:Coronavirus_disease_2019](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Coronavirus_disease_2019#Discretionary_sanctions_on_the_use_of_preprints)) it takes a lot of effort to collapse that thread and navigate to another topic on the page, //"...having opened up a topic I want to view, and then having scrolled down to the bottom of it, there is no quick and easy way to collapse the thread again. So I have to scroll/swipe all the way up again. collapse the thread, then repeat the process with the next thread and so on."// [4]
-- En.wiki's Teahouse uses [{{skip to top and bottom}}](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Skip_to_top_and_bottom) to help with this.
---
1. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Vjxycppfwer4qmrm&topic_showPostId=vk53kim40u3prxze#flow-post-vk53kim40u3prxze
2. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Vjxycppfwer4qmrm&topic_showPostId=vk53kim40u3prxze#flow-post-vk53kim40u3prxze
3. Awaiting confirmation on which mobile talk experience is being referred to here. The [default talk experience](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Advanced_mobile_contributions#/media/File:AMC_-_Talk_page_UI_-_initial.png) or the "Read as a wiki page" experience.
4. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Vjl9e4d6kwjbtbxf&topic_showPostId=vkpbxx1ce8slir61#flow-post-vkpbxx1ce8slir61