On 22 July 2015 at 10:52, Dmitry Brant <dbrant@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Therefore, providing access to talk pages without providing the other fundamentals that are central to editing (moderation tools, watchlists, diffs, notifications, etc) may be putting the cart before the horse, and may lead to confusion.

I think you hit the nail on the head with this comment.

Experienced Wikipedians know the value of talk pages. For many of them, talk pages actually comprise the majority of their usage of the site. But, the majority of their navigation to those pages are through their watchlist, so adding a talk page link doesn't serve them; they know the talk page is there, and how to find it if they need it.

For newer users, talk pages are their entry point into the inner workings of the wiki, and how they get sucked in. But, there are some pretty fundamental formatting issues with talk pages in the app right now. If you're going to make it read only, how are you going to explain to users why other users are leaving comments, but they can't edit it? Suddenly, there are a lot of questions that will take a lot of team bandwidth, designs, and discussions to answer. Can you commit to answering all of these questions given the other work you have in the pipeline?

For the reasons above, I was opposed (and still am) to adding links to talk pages in the app. For experienced editors, they know where to find them and don't need a button to get there. For readers (the primary user type that the app supports), the talk page experience in the app is not good enough to expose the users to it, and we never had the capacity to get the experience to a place where it was good enough for them without considerable work to build out the entire pipeline.

Dan

Dan Garry

Lead Product Manager, Discovery

Wikimedia Foundation