Problem: Navboxes are a common way to link between related topics on articles. These are not shown on the mobile view, limiting the ability of readers to browse related topics.
Who would benefit: Readers and editors
Proposed solution: Show navboxes on the mobile app and web view. Use side scrolling if there is not enough space, similar to how tables are handled.
Hi Feminist. Thanks for submitting a proposal. Can you give an example too for people who are unfamiliar with what navboxes are? I think the term "navbox" is very English-wikipedia centric. I'd prefer to generalize it so folks from other wikis can recognize the need here and vote for it too. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 21:54, 7 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
There are a lot of UI design problems with this proposal, and most of them are documented in Phabricator. There is also the download-size problem, also documented there. I don't really think this is a good CommTech task because of the question of navbox size. --Izno (talk) 00:02, 9 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
+1 - I'm curious to how this would work? The templates need a lot of work and it's unclear to me if WMF is officially allowed to edit templates and whether that counts as paid editing. Enabling them as is would be detrimental to performance and user experience so doing so will require a lot of community support. Given the high amounts of votes for this has anyone thought about how this would be scoped? Is the request for some kind of consultancy on how those templates can be improved? Hindu Wikipedia did something similar with updating their main page for mobile. Jdlrobson (talk) 21:12, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support I think it could be made work even with the knowledge of current technical limits. Right now mobile version significantly lacks navigation options, so experimenting with providing more of them should be good. stjn[ru]09:32, 17 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Yesssss. Lack of navigation boxes and categories is the reason I very often open an article on mobile just to remind myself to check it out later on desktop. Joalbertine (talk) 08:45, 19 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Perhaps some of the concerns about this feature could be alleviated by imposing a limit on the number of links in a navbox. Any navbox that exceeded the limit would continue to be hidden. This might encourage people to break up some of the awful, sprawling examples - and everyone would benefit from that. Gareth (talk) 12:28, 20 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose unless communities are willing to put the effort in to make navboxes significantly more mobile friendly using tools like TemplateStyles, which were recently deployed for this exact purpose. Navboxes were hidden for a reason: they have very poor usability on mobile. In some rare cases even account for up to 50% of the data transmitted to a person's mobile device, significantly increasing their data usage, which is very bad for people in emerging communities that use slow mobile devices on metered data connections. Simply cramming something into the mobile viewport (when it even has poor usability on desktop!) and expecting to deliver value is naive. We should meet in the middle, by putting in the effort to make the navboxes actually mobile friendly, then consider putting them into the mobile views. --Deskana (talk) 12:29, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Support Tom Ja (talk) 20:18, 16 November 2018 (UTC)
Oppose unless communities are willing to put the effort in to make navboxes significantly more mobile friendly using tools like TemplateStyles, which were recently deployed for this exact purpose. Navboxes were hidden for a reason: they have very poor usability on mobile. In some rare cases even account for up to 50% of the data transmitted to a person's mobile device, significantly increasing their data usage, which is very bad for people in emerging communities that use slow mobile devices on metered data connections. Simply cramming something into the mobile viewport (when it even has poor usability on desktop!) and expecting to deliver value is naive. We should meet in the middle, by putting in the effort to make the navboxes actually mobile friendly, then consider putting them into the mobile views. --Deskana (talk) 12:29, 22 November 2018 (UTC)
