This task represents the work with enabling the full suite of Usability Improvements default-on features for everyone (logged in + out) at Phase 5 wikis.
Deployment plan
| Wiki | Announcement date + link | Deployment date |
|---|---|---|
| ✅ 2 April 2025 | ||
| Basque Wikipedia | Next up | |
| Catalan Wikipedia | Next up | |
| Danish Wikipedia | Next up | |
| English Wikipedia | ||
| Finnish Wikipedia | Next up | |
| Greek Wikipedia | Next up | |
| Latvian Wikipedia | Next up | |
| Norwegian Bokmål Wikipedia | Next up | |
| Polish Wikipedia | ||
| Russian Wikipedia | Blocked on Vector22 deployment | |
| Simple English Wikipedia | Next up | |
| Swedish Wikipedia | ||
Deployment date
See above
Requirements
Meta
People who meet the criteria below will see the "UX changes" listed below when visiting any Article or User talk pages on desktop:
- People who have NOT explicitly disabled the Show discussion activity setting within Special:Preferences
- People accessing anyone of the Deployment wikis using the desktop version of the site
UX Changes
Topic Containers
- All section headings are styled in the way we defined in T310914
- All sections that contain signed comments contain metadata in the way we defined in T310914
- All sections that do NOT contain signed comments do NOT contain any metadata
Clear Affordances
- All Reply links/buttons appear in the way(s) we defined in T320684
Page Frame
- A visual space appears between the "namespace" and "page" name portion of a talk page's title
- An indicator that describes, and links to, the latest comment published on a given talk page appears at the top of the talk page
- Information appears within the table of contents about the number of comments within each section
Minimum test case
- At English Wikipedia, and at remaining wikis, visit Special:Preferences
- Ensure the Show discussion activity setting is enabled
- Visit a User or Article talk page
Local announcement
This is the text that was used previously for announcing the deployment.
Hello
For your information, the Editing team will soon change how talk pages look. These changes have been available as a Beta feature for a while at your wiki.
During the cross-wikis discussions in 2019, volunteers of all experience levels reported that the presentation of talk pages, and the usage of wikitext, makes them hard to recognize as discussion places. Volunteers also shared that understanding the conversations happening within these talk pages, and identifying what they need to do to participate in these conversations is unnecessarily difficult.
The Usability Improvements we will deploy soon at your Wikipedia aim to help all contributors – no matter their experience level – to communicate more easily on Wikimedia wikis and beyond. This new deployment is the follow-up of recent improvements on talk pages, such as topic subscription, discussion page permalinks, the button for adding a topic or the default presentation of an empty discussion page.
Four improvements will been added to talk pages.
Improved heading appearance
We changed how the talk page’s main title, adding a space after “Talk:”, and all section titles look, now using Sans-serif. The goal is to distinguish them from the article’s contents.
The heading for each topic summarises the overall activity of a given discussion: it displays the number of participants, comments, and the date of the last comment. Clicking on the date takes you to the latest comment on the topic.
Action buttons are emphasized
The buttons for replying, subscribing, and starting a new topic appear in a bolder typeface, instead of looking like a regular link. The brackets that highlighted these links are removed so that they won’t be confused with in-text links.
Soon, new options will be provided close to this reply button, like the possibility of thanking a user for a comment.
The button for starting a new topic on a talk page is not always easy to find. The “new topic” button has been improved in the Vector 2022 skin: a blue button in the sticky header now shows where to start a conversation.
An improved table of contents
For Vector 2022 skin users, the table of contents shows the number of comments within a topic, making it easier to spot the most popular discussion topics.
Meta information at the top of the page
A breadcrumb with meta-information is added at the top of the talk page. The latest comment added, with a date, is highlighted, as is the topic it was posted in.
We tested these improvements
Changing a design can be confusing for some users. To learn whether the suite of desktop talk page design changes were negatively impacting peoples’ experiences using talk pages, the Editing team conducted two analyses to check how user engagement went, through the revert rate of edits at the talk page, and check on the possible negative impact of the improvements.
Next steps
We will deploy these changes on the week of February 17. Italian is one of the last wikis where these changes haven't been deployed to. You can still test the feature in your Beta features. Users who prefer the old look will be able to opt-out the feature in their preferences.
If you have questions, please post them in response to this message.