Whatamidoing following up on your comments at enwiki - adding some styling (css?) to "talk" pages to differentiate them from "content" pages sounds like it may be useful, but pleas keep in mind that the "Project" namespace is widely used for "talking" on many projects, often more so than "Project talk". If you wanted to start on a namespace level to ensure readers are not confusing content pages with non-content pages, perhaps styling everything that isn't a ns-0 may be a good first start? Xaosflux (talk) 01:01, 11 October 2019 (UTC)
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project
That is a good practice and in fact was used for years in monobook in some projects https://el.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css I believe it can also be applied to ns0 manually per page through templatestyles (if the sanitizer allows it).
Differentiating talk pages from content pages would make total sense. And cleaning up a bit how communities use some namespaces would also make sense! (Like Wikipedia: or Project: namespace used to discuss instead of using the talk page.) In both cases, it would ease newcomers' first steps, by decreasing the confusion factor.
In short, I'm for distinguishing the contents from the discussions. But I'm also for distinguishing help contents, maintenance contents, etc. Coloured background is a first step, but this meeds a more radical (and fully accessible) design.
Thanks @Trizek @Geraki @Xaosflux : Hi I am Jess, the designer on the project. I really appreciate that you are highlighting some examples here. I definitely am planning on exploring how to differentiate read and edit modes, with edit mode here being the Talk page. We are prioritizing making sure that any styling changes will not interfere with the article. We will be making incremental changes (rather than a wholesale new design tomorrow) so that we can test and see what gels well with different types of pages.
A newcomer told me recently that she was redirected to articles when she tried to contact people. since talk pages and article have exactly the same design, it lead this user to confusion. My user talk page has a different design since it uses Flow... I hope this would help you to prioritize design changes the best way, Jess!
Thanks for sharing that @Trizek that's definitely a good example of something we should address.
If this is more about ensuring that "content" (ns-0) pages are distinctive (as opposed to 'a page where a discussion may take place') then styling everything different from ns-0 doesn't sound like it would be very disruptive. @JKlein (WMF): Examples of Project-space being used for "discussing" are common on projects like enwiki for example: w:en:Wikipedia:Village pump (technical), where the discussion happens on the project page, and the project-talk page is used for discussion management of the discussions or other meta-discussions.
Thanks for these examples!