Forum:Spin-off indicators

I would like to propose the usage of indicators with icons for linking to pages about the same topic in other namespaces. The intent is to allow users to easily switch between the different topics, similar to the extra page tabs on Runescape Wiki. Currently this is mostly done using hatnotes like on Steve, however on many pages those link just to a disambiguation because there are so many similar pages (like Zombie). The indicators would instead be displayed on the top right, allowing them to always be visible without taking away space in the article body.

I have already created {{Spin-off}}, which could be used to add those indicators. The mobile skin sadly doesn't support indicators, so in that case a normal hatnote listing the pages will be displayed instead.

I've added all the possible indicators to this page, linking to all variants of the Zombie article. If you are on mobile, you will see the hatnote below instead.

Please let me know what you think about this idea and if we should implement the icon indicators. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 19:58, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Oppose for the reason you’ve already pointed out — page status indicators not working on mobile. A much better solution would be doing pseudo-tabs like on the new main page. — BabylonAS 20:04, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

The main page tabs are in the article body, they will look quite weird on normal articles when they are below the page title and actions. While the indicators don't work on mobile, my template still keeps a hatnote which is the same as already used to link to those pages.

However it might be possible to change the mobile display of the template to look closer to the tabs as you suggested. For desktop however the tabs would look like a waste of space on pages which exist only in one or two of the spin-offs. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 20:10, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

It is better to have a consistent design for both desktop and mobile platforms. Also, indicators are located on the page’s right side, which is quite an awkward position for something meant to be easily accessible. Plus other indicators like protection locks exist... we should probably not let them mix with spin-off icons. — BabylonAS 20:18, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Nothing is consistent between mobile and desktop, why start caring about that so heavily with this? The right side is also where the other languages are located, shall we change that? - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
15:34, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

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 Support for I find the icon indicators being visually separated in a consistent location logically nice for something that shifts your namespace. — 👁 Image
alizard (talk) 20:25, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Strong oppose per Babylon -- Consistency between desktop and mobile is important. We should be focusing on accessibility for mobile, not making more issues like this. This'll just create more confusion; no one would realize what the indicators would be for, they're not very useful anyway, and plus, I can only imagine conversations involving someone mentioning the indicators and someone else questioning why they were mentioned because they can't see them and then both would be very confused. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  20:33, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

And, oh, don't get me started on performance issues! The way we currently have it is fine, no need for unnecessary changes that just add inconsistency, confusion, lag, and difficulty! What about the "not to be confused with" hatnotes? Are we supposed to change those too for more inconsistency? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  21:35, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

I'm not sure where you see any performance issues or lag? My proposal is just normal wikitext like everything else in the articles.

And no one is proposing this for more inconsistency. Currently the other namespaces are just very hidden and I would like to make them more visible. Yes, the suggestion looks better on desktop than it does on mobile due to restrictions by the skin, however this would be far from the first time for us to use different styles on desktop and mobile. Relevent tutorial and guide notices are the most recent example, and they were even added for quite similar reasons as this proposal.

The mobile skin is more restrictive because it is focused on mobile devices with smaller screens. We need to account for that when implementing changes, however that doesn't mean we need to unnecessarily restrict ourselves on desktop. Why should desktop have a worse experience than necessary, just to look like the mobile skin? They are different skins specifically so that we can have each of them focus on the best experience for their target. Having the same information on both skins is the important part, no skin should lack any information, but displaying that information can be different if it looks better for that skin.

With my proposal here mobile has a hatnote, which is already that what is currently used to link those pages. So in the worst case this is a net neutral change for mobile while improving the display on desktop. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 21:59, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

1. Performance issues could come with more images and indicators. Don't take good internet for granted; we even have a template for pages with too many images!

2. It's confusion that's the problem. Like I said, there could easily be conversations about this where everyone is confused by it! Plus, simple images won't provide the information needed for clarity that comes with the way we're doing it currently; people wouldn't have a clue that the images are links to pages about different games.

3. Sure it "looks cool", but that's subjective anyway.

4. Surely we can still give mobile view a bit of consideration? To me it looks like we don't even care about it.

5. Still, what about the other hatnotes? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  22:18, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

1. It would be at most 5 small images, that won't affect performance at all. Most infoboxes already have more images, and I don't even need to mention navboxes.
2. Considering the position of the icons outside the normal article body, noticing that they are skin specific is fairly easy. And as I already mentioned, the skins already have quite a few differences. Should we change our wiki logo as well because mobile can't see the globe so they will be confused whenever we have theme specific logos? Also I'm not sure about what clarity of the current way you are referring to, most articles with multiple spin-off variants got too long hatnotes and are now just linking to a disambiguation instead. So I consider having some icons for the spin-offs a lot more clear that having no mention or link to them at all.
3. Feel free to suggest a better design for the links.
4. Absolutely, I want mobile to look good as well. A hatnote was the simplest option that came to my mind, but we can easily add better displays instead as well. Feel free to suggest some.
5. What about them? I'm not sure what you are referring to here. They are hatnotes and they will probably stay hatnotes unless someone has a better way to convey their information.

-- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 22:40, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

1. Fair enough.

2. Okay I guess? But it'd be confusing because people might think other people on mobile that can't see them are on desktop and can't see them for an unrelated reason. As for the other confusions, the images make it unclear that there's other pages at all, and the thing I'm worried about is that for instance people looking for Dungeons:Drowned might search "drowned" and get to Drowned, and then be unsure how to get to the MCD page.

3. My point is that I'm not sure if it looking good is enough of a reason to make this change.

4. Ok I guess...

5. I feel like having both types of hatnotes, the edition ones and the "not to be confused with" hatnotes being in the same format makes it... good? I don't know. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  22:58, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

It uses the same icons from the main home page which I find pretty intuitive personally, and in theory should lead most users to have the asset already cached. — 👁 Image
alizard (talk) 22:56, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Yeah I know, so what? Myself I don't even find the main page icons to be an easy way of recognizing spinoffs, for instance the Story Mode one is a bit unclear. But that's a discussion for another time. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  23:00, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

If Harri's suggestions below are implemented with enough clarity, then 👁 Image
 Weak support. -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  14:41, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

I think it makes sense to have this feature. However, I'm not sure if the indicators are the best, and most importantly, the most obvious position for these buttons.

For Vector, I think it'd be great if we could have the different games in the place where we currently have "Page/Talk". Then, move the "Talk" button next to "Give feedback". I'm aware this is technically difficult to achieve but I think it'd be more obvious for readers. I'm aware that for some pages that might be too many tabs, making that section of the page too wide for some screen sizes. In that case we could then use the icons.

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For Minerva, I'm not entirely sure but it'd probably be ok to reuse the tab system from the main page. | violine1101 ^(talk) 20:45, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

That would run out of space very fast and, unlike the right side tabs, they would never collapse, instead forcing down the right side tabs and essentially breaking the skin. If a page has all tabs, the skin breaks already at widths below 1130px and below 1310px has the edit button hidden in the "More" menu.

Instead it might be more reasonable to use the variants dropdown from the Chinese language. It's normally hidden because it's empty, but if we were to use that it could look like this:

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However any solution like this would require JS to both add the tabs and pull which tabs to add from a hidden element in the article. Meanwhile the indicators work with just wikitext. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 21:05, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

I think dropdowns aren't great and should generally avoided. And yeah I know of the problems you mentioned - I was more thinking about what the optimal solution in my mind would look like disregarding technical implementation. | violine1101 ^(talk) 21:49, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Strong Support the idea for the icons in the top-right, at least on desktop. 👁 Image
 Neutral about implementing it on mobile, I don't use mobile for the wiki so don't know how this looks on mobile. But if it really doesn't fit on mobile, then why not enable this for desktop only and do something else for mobile, like a dropdown? I don't like the idea of buttons or a dropdown on tab section on desktop, that section is used for editing tools and other more technical stuff, not for something related to the article itself. MinecraftBedrockPlayer7 (talk) (contribs) 👁 Image
21:12, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Y'know that implementing this on desktop would pretty much mean implementing it on mobile? Also It's not that indicators don't fit, they simply don't show up on mobile; they just don't! Also, sure the section on the top is for reader stuff, but then why is the "talk" tab there? Also, I'll tell you why we wouldn't do this on desktop even if it doesn't work on mobile: inconsistency! And might I add, why do you support it strongly? Is there any reasoning you have? -~- Nerdyguy2000   Talk   Edits  21:32, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Support As someone who mostly writes for spin-off articles this would be a lifesaver, though it might be a little problematic for certain subjects. Not all versions of a character or mob use the same name, after all. For example, zombies in Legends are actually zombie villagers, since zombies of humans don’t exist yet within the narrative. I’m sure it would be easy to code in but that might be a little unintuitive for one-time exceptions. Realshow19 (talk) 23:41, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

{{Spin-off}} has some parameters to add different page names as well. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 23:45, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Support as someone who always do hatnote disambiguations, this would help in reducing the need to type sentences, and avoid making hatnotes into paragraphs. 👁 Image
 Oppose the hatnote implementation in mobile since I already see this as a way to shorten hatnotes. Would it be possible if to just put the indicators as tabbers together with "Page", "Talk", and "Forum" in mobile? 👁 Image
QwertyLilley [ talk ] 03:35, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Support Having a visual tabber between games. I don't see why this cant be on mobile as well.  Nixinova   T   C   04:46, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Support adding something but 👁 Image
 Oppose indicators top-right. It would be confusing to have them next to similar-looking protected or featured icons. I think tabs, dropdown or same as main page would be better. 👁 Image
Miner(👁 Image
talk 👁 Image
contributions) 06:33, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Support although, I dont like how it just looks like a hatnote on mobile. Perhaps something similar to the language button could be done? Where it opens a "dropdown" menu (similar to one, but isnt actually one, its more of a popup? Im not the best at describing things in a way most people understand lol) that lists all existing language versions of the page, and, of course, in this case it would be namespace and not language.
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amethyst_hhh 👁 Image
^(t)(survey) 06:49, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Support but with two suggestions:

1. On hover, add a more obvious text box, just like how invicons work. I know that all browsers have functionality like this, but it takes a moment for the box to appear and disappears with any mouse movement. I know this point is probably so specific that it's annoying, but I'd really like it to be as blatant as possible what these boxes mean.
2. Add the same functionality to mobile via a drop down menu of some sort. Keeping the hatnotes but only on mobile would be a real mess in my opinion.

- Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
11:42, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Strong support this in some way, shape or form. However I would prefer for it to be a dropdown similar to the languages dropdown when JavaScript is enabled. The current indicator version takes up too much space when there are many spin-off articles and it might not be immediately understood what those icons mean. A dropdown also means we would have an easy solution for mobile since we can also add a spin-off button that opens a spin-off menu next to the language button. GIM Dianliang233 (talk) 11:52, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Agree with you, especially on the mobile part, as that's almost exactly what I said :)
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amethyst_hhh 👁 Image
^(t)(survey) 13:08, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Oppose to this proposal to add indicators for spin-off pages, especially because they take up a lot of space (in addition to the protection icons, featured articles and interwikis), they are also not very obvious and this white border around the icons doesn't look very good. The dropdown menu proposed above seems like a good option, but it takes up a lot of space on mobile since I use desktop on mobile, and I also hide the visual editor tab in my CSS so that the "Edit source" tab doesn't appear in "More".

Perhaps, even another pointer could be used to indicate the article in other namespaces, but, if I had to choose one of the proposals commented here, I would choose the drop-down menu.
  — Herobrine222376 ^{( Talk | Contributions | pt-br )} 15:27, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

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 Support for this or another implementation with equivalent functionality that works for mobile as well. —👁 Image
Delycache ^{(Talk | Contributions)} 23:31, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

A possible workaround for indicators not working on mobile would be to put a set of faux indicators above the infobox. It's the same set of images with the same links, and in the same position as the indicators, just lower. Since they're just linked images, they should work on mobile.

File:Indicators above infobox.png
Rampage455 (talk) 03:47, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

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 Support, seems like a good workaround. I'd make the box slightly smaller though, the render should still be the first thing you notice. Realshow19 (talk) 03:51, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Wouldn't work for mobile. The first paragraph or so of text in the article, as well as any hatnotes and/or message boxes, show up above the infobox. They would have to be placed either in or above the icon bar to not disrupt the article itself 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
03:52, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Here is a roughly drawn mockup of something similar that would work on mobile if it is possible to put it there. 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
04:13, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Personally I'd like whichever option we go with to be a dropdown, the row of icons look good with how few namespaces we have now but inevitably there's going to be dozens more, and it's impossible to know how quickly. Realshow19 (talk) 04:16, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Oh yeah I absolutely also would prefer a dropdown, I was just making a mockup similar to this suggestion. 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
04:20, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

In reality, this would only work for those with an account, as the Page and Talk tabs only appear in the advanced mobile mode. If you are logged out, only some icons will be displayed at the top, without these tabs. However, a drop-down menu next to the feedback button (if advanced mode is disabled) would look great on mobile devices. - 👁 Image
Herobrine222376 | Talk 12:01, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

That screenshot was taken with advanced mobile mode off, actually 👁 Image
amethyst_hhh👁 Image
13:57, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

But when viewing any page without an account, the tabs don't appear. - 👁 Image
Herobrine222376 | Talk 14:19, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Changing my position slightly, I 👁 Image
 support the idea of adding links to the topic in other places, but in drop-down menus, like this one on the desktop. On mobile, I think an "In other spaces" menu could be added to the right (in the same location amethyst_hhh suggested, but as a dropdown menu) and next to the feedback button if advanced mode is disabled. This could be implemented as a gadget enabled by default. I just don't know exactly how it could identify cases where the topic in another namespace doesn't have exactly the same title, perhaps by adding some template to the page or something so that the gadget sets the link. - 👁 Image
Herobrine222376 | Talk 12:36, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

If we do a drop down it should be in the same style to the languages drop down I think. - Harri / Talk 👁 Image
13:13, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

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 Strong support, independently by how it's done. However I have a question: what would happen with stuff like Skeleton Horseman and Dungeons:Skeleton Horseman? would the indicators be used in cases like this? 👁 Image
D62 IT Admin (C|T) 12:32, 6 March 2026 (UTC)